Jennifer Willott: Every year the Cardiff women's safety unit supports about 1,500 domestic violence cases. I know that the Minister is aware of its excellent work, but is he aware that the unit is facing funding shortages in the short term, as some charitable funds are coming to an end, and also in the long term, with funding for the Cardiff community safety partnership being cut by 14 per cent.? Will he speak to the Home Office to ensure that the unit is able to maintain the good work that it does well into the future?

Huw Irranca-Davies: As mentioned by the hon. Lady in whose constituency the unit is located, I visited the unit recently with my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, North (Julie Morgan) and saw at first hand the very good work that it carries out. The unit is a model of good practice and provides an invaluable service. This year it received £247,298 core funding from the Assembly Government, which is secure for 2008-09. That is an increase on the original three-year allocation approved in March 2006. In addition, for 2007-08 the Assembly has awarded £63,442 to fund the male helpline which operates from the unit, and that is an increase as well. The Assembly is considering its budget plans for future years, but I applaud the work that the unit does and the secure funding that is in place.

Julie Morgan: Is my hon. Friend aware of the pioneering success of the women's safety units in halving the number of cases of repeat offences of domestic abuse? That has been brought about by their pioneering system of holding multi-agency conferences on all cases of high-risk domestic abuse. Is my hon. Friend aware that this system has been copied in 70 areas of the UK, and that Wales has been leading the way in this regard?

Huw Irranca-Davies: Absolutely. It would right and proper to say that we recognise the work of my hon. Friend in taking the initiative forward from its instigation. Yes, the multi-agency risk conferences are not only innovative, but they are proving their effectiveness. We hope to see more and more of them across the UK. It is worth pointing out the Government's commitment to specialist domestic violence courts, of which there are eight in Wales and more to come in the UK. That shows how serious the Government are, both at UK level and in the Welsh Assembly Government.

Huw Irranca-Davies: My hon. Friend has been a tireless campaigner on behalf of his constituents and north Wales rail. We welcome the new direct service between Wrexham and Marylebone. In respect of the Wrexham to Bidston electrification, the co-operation between Merseytravel and the Welsh Assembly Government to examine the feasibility of improving the line is welcome because it could indeed deliver improved rail links, leading to economic and employment opportunities. I understand that the Welsh Assembly Government are considering the options resulting from the feasibility study. Decisions on the way forward will be a matter for them, but as my hon. Friend has been such a strong advocate of rail issues in his constituency and across the region, I am more than happy to meet him and discuss the matter further.

Madeleine Moon: While welcoming the news about the improvement of railway services in north Wales, may I ask my hon. Friend what impact the recently published rail White Paper will have on railways not only in north Wales, but across Wales?

David Jones: I want to return to the question raised by the hon. Member for Wrexham (Ian Lucas), namely the electrification of the Wrexham to Bidston line, which is extremely important to the economy of north-east Wales. We know that the Welsh Assembly Government were committed to that proposal before the Assembly elections, but now they appear to have shelved the scheme for up to 12 years. Does the Minister know the reason for that change of plan? Was it perhaps a concession extracted from the First Minister by his Plaid Cymru coalition partners to enable them to pursue policies that are likely to find favour in the areas where they are strongest?

Peter Hain: If they are sensible proposals, they will be a matter for the Welsh Assembly Government to implement.
	I assume that the hon. Gentleman agrees with the hon. Member for Monmouth (David T.C. Davies), sitting behind him, who said in  The Western Mail on 21 September:
	"Some Conservatives like myself, and all my fellow MPs, feel we were correct to oppose the establishment of the Assembly and should continue to oppose further powers"
	for the Welsh Assembly. I assume that the hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Mr. Evennett) and the Conservative Front Benchers agree with that, as the hon. Member for Monmouth was claiming ownership of all Conservative MPs.

Cheryl Gillan: But we are always interested in what the Secretary of State says in  The Western Mail. Given the Plaid Cymru-Labour coalition in the Assembly, how will the governance of Wales be helped by Plaid MPs calling the Chancellor's settlement for Wales the worst settlement since devolution and the Secretary of State boasting that Wales gets £1,000 more expenditure per head than England and calling Plaid "the enemy"?
	Does the Secretary of State agree that in addition to discussions with the First Minister, he needs to have urgent discussions with his coalition partners in this Chamber—or does the proposal and promise of "One Wales" not apply here in Westminster?

Peter Hain: Yes, indeed. What nSure is doing is very good, and I notice that Swansea is leading the way with RAP International based at the Technium Swansea. Swansea university has a Technium digital base there, and there is a £3 million Boots centre for innovation, designed to assist global researchers and entrepreneurs. That is a good sign that Swansea is leading the way and becoming a city that will make a major impact in the ICT sector, which as my hon. Friend says, is crucial to the strength of the Welsh economy.

Hywel Francis: The Secretary of State will know about the recent Bevan Foundation study, entitled "Caring and Working? A Welsh Case Study", which addresses the barriers that carers face in returning to work. Does he agree that one of the best ways in which to help carers in Wales and elsewhere is to review the carer's allowance and significantly improve their respite care? Does he also agree that the Prime Minister's review of the national carer's strategy and his excellent initiative to establish a carer's commission present an ideal opportunity to assist carers and thus reduce economic inactivity in Wales?

Nick Ainger: My right hon. Friend will be aware of the transformation in economic success of my constituency. Ten years ago, it was an unemployment blackspot, now it has almost full employment. However, problems remain with economic inactivity. May I draw his attention to the work of the Prince's Trust and Pembrokeshire college, which are delivering upskilling for young people, 140 of whom are based at the Cleddau activity centre, which my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary visited in September?
	Wearing his other hat as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions—

David Cameron: The Prime Minister is going to have to do better than that. Let us try another claim. Did the draft of the pre-Budget report, written before the Conservative party conference, include plans for the taxation of non-doms and the raising of inheritance tax? A simple question: yes or no?

Gordon Brown: We are cutting the basic rate of income tax, from 22p to 20p in the pound—but what we will not do is follow Liberal party policy, which would cut the basic rate by another 4p, costing £12 billion and putting the public finances at risk. In exactly the same way as the Conservative party, they would put the management of the economy at risk. We will not follow that policy.

Gordon Brown: I congratulate Liverpool on becoming the city of culture. Having visited the city and seen what has been done to prepare for that, I know that there is more urban regeneration taking place in Liverpool than at any time in the last 20 to 25 years. I would also say to my hon. Friend that the local government settlement and the public expenditure plans announced yesterday will help Liverpool and the north-west, ensuring that jobs can be created in the area and that urban regeneration continues. We will keep our promises to the people of Liverpool.

Nick Gibb: The Prime Minister might be aware of proposals in West Sussex to downgrade the accident and emergency units at either St. Richard's hospital in Chichester or at Worthing hospital. Will he therefore clarify Lord Darzi's comment on the "Today" programme last week that his statement that the days of the district general hospital are gone applies only
	"to big metropolitan capital cities like London".
	Given that neither Chichester nor Worthing are big metropolitan capital cities, will the Prime Minister assure my constituents that both these excellent hospitals are now safe?

Gordon Brown: There is also an interesting debate to be heard on the future of incapacity benefit in this country. My hon. Friend is absolutely right: under our proposals, 1 million people will come off incapacity benefit by 2015. Under an alternative proposal, it is said that that figure could be 1.6 million: two thirds of those currently on incapacity benefit would come off it and lose £5,000 per person. It is said that that proposal, put forward by the Opposition, would raise £3 billion. Given the number of constituents we know who are disabled and who are in wheelchairs, and the many who are mentally as well as physically handicapped, the idea that 1.6 million of 2.7 million people could come off incapacity benefit by the beginning of the next Parliament is faintly ridiculous. Given that we already expect 1 million to come off incapacity benefit, those who say that they can raise £3 billion from that proposal are, again, completely wrong.

Ian Paisley: May I remind the Prime Minister that some time ago an announcement was made about Northern Ireland losing many of its Army installations, and a promise was made in a joint statement that the people of Northern Ireland would benefit from what was done with those particular areas of Government ownership? Will the Prime Minister give me an assurance today that that will be done, and will he announce the time when it will be done?

Gordon Brown: I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. I think that what the Association of British Insurers announced today is a review of its practices for the future. I hope that it will not take the step that he suggests, which might be considered, of denying people insurance. I also have to say, again in the interests of accuracy, that over the summer period and very recently, the Association of British Insurers has asked that by 2011 we spend £750 million a year on flood defences. The figures that we announced yesterday are that we have raised spending on flood defences from £600 million this year to £800 million in 2011. I hope that whatever difference there is between the Association of British Insurers and us—a very small difference, on the figures involved—we can show, as a result of the Pitt report, which will come soon, that we are doing everything we can to improve flood defences in this country.

Graham Brady: On 20 September the governor of the Bank of England said that the market abuse directive had actually undermined his ability to carry out an operation that would have been in the interests of everyone connected with Northern Rock. Does the Prime Minister agree?

Lynne Featherstone: Does the Prime Minister think it right that a pupil in my country receives, on average, £736 less than a pupil in an inner-London borough, although the cost of employing a teacher is the same? Will he put an end to that huge injustice, so that schools in Hornsey and Wood Green can finally be given a fair funding deal?

Alan Johnson: After a decade of unprecedented investment in the NHS, we see the results in more staff, 1 million more operations each year, 100 new hospitals, reduced waiting times and lower mortality rates, particularly for cancer and cardiovascular diseases. Having expanded capacity in the service, we can now focus even more closely on raising quality. Last week, Lord Darzi published his interim report setting out a vision for world-class health and health care in England, developed and owned by patients, staff and the public. Yesterday's comprehensive spending review settlement enables us to take the measures necessary to begin to implement that vision.
	It is a good settlement for the NHS: locking in current record levels of spending and adding real-terms increases—year on year—so that total health spending will rise from just over £90 billion in 2007-08 to £110 billion in 2010-11. That represents a real-terms increase of 4 per cent. a year on planned spend, compared with an historic average of 3.1 per cent. In 18 years under the Tories, real-terms growth was 3 per cent. In the five years up to 1997, it was 2.6 per cent. In 14 years under Labour up to 2010-11, real-terms growth will average 5.6 per cent. That extra funding is essential if we are to meet the challenges of an ageing society, the opportunities of new technology and the demands of rising public expectations of what a health service in the 21st century should deliver. I am proud that it is a Labour Government that have delivered, and will continue to deliver, these necessary increases in funding.
	Lord Darzi's interim report drew out four overarching themes for the NHS over the next 10 years: fairness, personalisation, innovation and safety. First, an NHS which is fair: no single institution has made a greater contribution to social equity in this country than the NHS, yet 60 years on, whilst the health of all income groups has improved dramatically, stubborn health inequalities remain. We will begin to address one important element of this problem with a new £250 million access fund that will deliver at least 100 new GP practices in the 25 per cent. of primary care trusts with the poorest provision. These practices will bring the most modern healthcare models direct to the nation's most deprived areas. They will offer an innovative range of services, will be open for longer, and will have a specific remit to prevent ill health rather than simply treat it. That is crucial when lifestyle choices are responsible for as much as half of the gap in health outcomes.
	Secondly, we want an NHS that is personalised. That means that GP practices should fit around people's lifestyles, not the other way around. We have set a clear aim that, working with new and existing GP practices, we will ensure that at least a half of all surgeries are open either at weekends or after work. We will also explore all the options for making it easier to see a GP nearer to the workplace for those who commute.
	The new access fund will also establish at least 150 new GP-run health centres in easily accessible locations, open seven days a week from 8 am to 8 pm. These will offer bookable appointments, walk-in services and, in some cases, access to physiotherapy, diagnostics and social care services. There will be at least one in each PCT area.
	More than a third of GP time is spent dealing with mental health problems, from which one in six people suffer at any one time. Mental illness accounts for 40 per cent. of those on incapacity benefit. Prescription medication provides a successful treatment for many, but we know that psychological therapies work equally well, and often prove to be more effective in the long term. The time has come to do much more to help those with depression and anxiety.
	I can announce today—which is, of course, world mental health day—that we will build a groundbreaking psychological therapy service in England. Backed by new investment rising to £170 million by 2010-11, the service will be capable of treating 900,000 additional patients suffering from depression and anxiety over the next three years. Around half are likely to be completely cured, with many fewer people with mental health problems having to depend on sick pay and benefits.
	Thirdly, we want an NHS that is innovative. British scientists have been responsible for discovering some of the most important medical breakthroughs in history. In this modern age of rapid medical scientific and technological advance, we must ensure that the NHS remains at the cutting edge of developments in products, processes and procedures.
	We will establish a new health innovation council to drive a more innovative NHS, identifying and removing barriers to change. The council will bring together all the splendid work that is going on, from discovery through development to adoption, and ensure that ideas can pass efficiently from the labs to patients without any compromise to patient safety. In addition, we will set up a new £100 million fund for innovation jointly funded with the Wellcome Trust.
	We will also expand the single fund for health research to £1.7 billion. In the 18th century, Edward Jenner discovered the smallpox vaccine. In the 19th century, British scientists developed anaesthetics and antiseptics. In the 20th century, Alexander Fleming discovered antibiotics. In the 21st century, we want British scientists to combine to lead in the fight against global killers such as cancer and HIV/AIDS.
	Fourthly, we want an NHS that is safe. Healthcare-acquired infections are a growing problem around the world. Hospital cleanliness should be the last concern of patients and the first duty of everyone in the health service. We have announced that all hospitals will be deep cleaned at least once a year. Isolation wards will be extended wherever possible, and we will empower and encourage matrons and nurses to use their expertise to fight infection on the front line.
	The Health and Social Care Bill contained in our draft legislative programme will provide the new health and adult social regulator with tougher powers, backed by fines, to inspect, investigate and intervene in those hospitals that fail to meet hygiene and infection control standards. As Lord Darzi recommended and the CSR provides for, we will invest £130 million to introduce MRSA screening for all admissions, elective and emergency, over the next three years. We will also put a further £140 million into reducing clostridium difficile infection rates.
	To develop an NHS that is clinically led and locally driven we need more local accountability. I have already said that there will be no top-down structural reorganisation of strategic health authorities and primary care trusts for the foreseeable future. Although we must ensure minimum standards, we will not impose a swathe of new targets. We know that future improvements will come from more local ownership, fewer top-down targets and concentration on better health outcomes.
	As Lord Darzi has said, any change to NHS services must clear a high clinical bar, based on full engagement with patients and the public. Ensuring that the health service is clinically led will be pivotal to ensuring that the service moves from good to great— world class in all aspects instead of just some. How we match local ownership with greater local accountability will be one of the principal aspects of Lord Darzi's continuing work.
	The historical problem for the health service has been under-investment. The challenge today is to ensure that we maximise the potential of this unprecedented level of increased investment. The public want more money to be spent on the NHS, but they also require it to be spent well. Measuring productivity when quality of care is paramount is not an easy task, as Wanless highlighted recently. The better care, better value indicators, published yesterday, showed that £363 million of productivity improvements were achieved last year. Those first-step savings came from reducing the length of stay and from increasing prescriptions of low-cost generic statins for patients with high cholesterol. Those gains are modest but they point to the potential of what can be achieved without compromising patient care.
	We must now look to build on these achievements, systematically and sensibly. Over the course of this spending round, the NHS will deliver average value for money gains of 3 per cent. every year, releasing more than £8 billion a year by 2010-11 to spend on front-line care. There are some obvious areas that can contribute in that difficult task. Improving community-based services so that people with long-term conditions can receive greater support in the community could bring savings of about £500 million a year. Intervening with preventive action, such as regular health check-ups, when someone is at risk of illness could reduce the costs of chronic lifestyle diseases such as diabetes, heart disease or lung cancer. Spreading new technologies and best practice across the health service could lead to savings of £1.5 billion a year. Improving procurement could save £1 billion a year, and by introducing MRSA screening for all admissions we can reduce the risk of huge costs occurring later.
	In the face of unprecedented demographic change, it is clear that our social care system needs to respond. The Chancellor has announced that we will develop a Green Paper exploring options for reform, with the aim of increasing dignity and reducing dependency for those who rely on our social care systems. The social care settlement is divided into two parts: local government grant and direct funding from my Department for social care. The local government support grant will increase by £2.6 billion by 2010-11 and direct funding from the Department of Health for adult social care, which covers, for example, carers, mental health and the social care work force, will increase by an average of 2.3 per cent. a year in real terms, worth £190 million.
	That funding will enable social services to do more to give service users and their carers greater choice and control over the way in which their needs are met. In particular, the investment will enable further expansion of care tailored to the individual; it will go into prevention and improving people's quality of life. It will enable more individuals to live independent lives in their own home. But as the Wanless report on social care identified, we need a radical rethink about how we fund that crucial element for everyone in need, not just the elderly, in the future. The Green Paper will begin that important process.
	Those are our concrete plans for future investment in the NHS, which our party created and then rescued from Tory decline. The Opposition promise to spend £2 billion on a tax cut for a wealthy elite, whereas we will spend that money on delivering a better health system for all our people. They have a black hole to fill and a dilemma to fix: either they break their promise on inheritance tax or they break their commitment to match our investment in the NHS.
	Lord Darzi and his team of 1,500 clinicians will finalise the NHS next stage review in time for the 60th anniversary of the NHS. This is an exciting time for everyone involved in health care, but as the comprehensive spending review demonstrated, it is patients and the public who will continue to benefit from a national health service that is rising to the challenges of the 21st century. I commend the statement to the House.

Alan Johnson: The hon. Gentleman asks me to say something of substance. Well, I could mention the new community hospital being built in Beverley, which he curiously never mentions in any debate on health.
	The hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) also said that we have somehow abandoned choice and abandoned new providers. The Minister of State, Department of Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr. Bradshaw), has been talking all morning to the independent sector about precisely the announcement that I have made about introducing these new, state-of-the-art facilities, which will be open from 8 am to 8 pm, seven days a week, into 150 PCTs around the country. We are talking to the independent sector all the time. I have made it clear in the House that we will judge the use of the independent sector on whether it can add to capacity, whether it provides value for money and whether it can improve the service.
	The hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire also mentioned Wanless. I shall make it clear what his report said:
	"The funding increase has helped to deliver some clear and notable improvements—more staff and equipment; improved infrastructure; significantly reduced waiting times and better access to care; and improved care in coronary heart disease, cancer, stroke and mental health."
	Wanless also says that
	"the direction of health care policy now being pursued by the government"
	is
	"correct to address the key challenges identified in the 2002 review."
	For good measure, he said:
	"The NHS is now in better shape than in 2002 to deliver improved quality and increased productivity".
	I will swap Wanless quotes all day.
	The hon. Gentleman also raised an important point of substance on productivity, which I mentioned in my statement. I said how difficult this issue was and that we have made modest gains over the past year. As he well knows, the difficulty is that people can examine two calculations. One can show that productivity has declined by 7 per cent. since 2002 and the other can show that it has increased by 8 per cent. The problem is how one defines quality of care when examining productivity. GPs now spend four minutes more with each patient than they did in the early '90s. The onus must be on spending more time and personalising care. The National Audit Office and others have found it almost impossible to define how one puts quality into productivity considerations. That is the dilemma. It is not that NHS staff are not working hard and doing their best: it is about how we reflect that in the statistics.
	The hon. Gentleman also talks about the 4 per cent. real-terms increase. This is an amazing continuation of record investment in the NHS. It is a 4 per cent. increase on forecast spend in this year. He promises to match it, and he also suggests that the Conservatives will go further on social care. That will just add to their black hole problem. Incidentally, the most recent document that I have read on their policies this area contained just one sentence on social care.
	We are saying that the 2006 Wanless report was a very important contribution. We need to move forward on it now, because Wanless made some important points, not least of which concerned the need for a partnership to cope with social care. He was examining how we provide proper social care in 2026.
	Our self-regard increases all the time as the Opposition nick our policies, but let us get this straight. They have now signed up to the NHS funded by the taxpayer. The patient passport, which was their policy, has gone. They have signed up to the idea of the NHS 60 years after we created it, having opposed it bitterly when it was introduced. They have signed up to the 10 core principles of the NHS plan, which we introduced in 2000 and they opposed. They have just come round to signing up to the spending commitments that we agreed in 2004. Accusing us of nicking their policies is rather rich coming from a party that has decided at last that it cares about the NHS. The public will see through that.

Norman Lamb: I thank the Secretary of State for early sight of the statement. In his response to the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley), he referred to the fact that he had delivered the interim report exactly three months after he had promised to do so, which was before the summer recess. That must be the first time ever that a Government report has been published on time. I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on his impeccable timing.
	I start by acknowledging the good things in the report. We warmly welcome the extra investment in psychological therapies, which is long overdue. There are many people languishing on incapacity benefit who could be helped back to work but who are not getting the help that they need. I also welcome the announcement on screening for hospital-acquired infections—a necessary change. I hope the Secretary of State agrees that there should be a zero tolerance of low hygiene standards, following the Dutch example, which nails down the standards expected in hospitals.
	I welcome the greater flexibility in accessing GPs and the focus on securing more access to GPs in the most deprived communities. The fact that people in those communities have poorer access to primary care is wholly unacceptable. If the proposal starts to address that, it is a good thing. The statement refers to local accountability. For a long time the Government have used the rhetoric of local accountability, but what does it mean? Will there be any substance to the assertion that it is important to listen to local communities and that they should have a say, rather than just staff having a say, important as that is? Innovation and spreading best practice are clearly good things. Is it right, though, to set up another quango to deliver them? Is that necessarily the best way of achieving the aim? How will it sit alongside the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, which already does work in this area?
	The statement gives little attention to care for elderly people— [Interruption.] The Secretary of State laughs, but this is an important issue. Is not Niall Dickson of the King's Fund right that the failure to support frail and vulnerable older people is one of the unrecognised scandals of our time? Although I welcome the tentative step towards some sort of resolution, is not the issue far more urgent than the Government acknowledge? The royal commission in 1999 recommended free personal care. The Liberal Democrats forced such a provision through in Scotland, and we want people in the rest of the UK to benefit in the way that people in Scotland already do.  [Interruption.] The Tories scoff, but it is a question of priorities. They prefer to give tax cuts of £300,000 to millionaires. We think that people who lose everything when a loved one develops dementia are a greater priority. Does the Secretary of State acknowledge that the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that in Scotland there is more care as a result of the introduction of free personal care, more innovation in services and public support for the policy in Scotland some years after it was introduced? Is not the truth that the funding of social care—care for the elderly—continues to lag scandalously behind other funding?
	The pre-Budget report highlights the fact that there is a 4 per cent. increase in NHS funding, which is absolutely necessary, but just a 1 per cent. increase for social care provided by local authorities. What is the justification for care for the elderly having such a low priority in the overall funding settlement? In the Department's budget for social care initiatives, why do we have to wait until 2010-11 before the bulk of the extra funding comes through, with very little extra funding next year or the year after? Is not the reality that social care continues to be cut and that yesterday's statement will do nothing to change that?
	Is it right that there should have been a 25 per cent. drop in households receiving domiciliary care in the past 10 years? The criteria tightened massively so that only the most urgent cases receive support, and charges were massively increased for people needing care in their own home. Is that not unacceptable treatment of elderly people? Why will we have to wait an interminable length of time before any reforms come in? Will the review include respite care? When I spoke carers last week, they made it clear that their top priority was gaining access to respite care, which is unavailable to many people in many parts of the country.
	What is the timing of the review? When will concrete proposals be introduced and will the review be given priority? Is there any real hope of reform, given that public finances are much tighter? Why, when yesterday's statement perpetuated the funding crisis for elderly care, should we have any confidence that the Government are genuinely committed to badly needed reform?

Bob Laxton: May I tell my right hon. Friend how much I welcome the visionary decision to put £170 million of new money into psychological services? Mental health trusts in Derby city and Derbyshire serve patients who in some cases have waited two years to access those services. Where will we get the clinicians, psychiatrists and therapists to provide those services? Furthermore, there are serious organisational deficiencies around the country in how services are provided, not least in Derbyshire.

George Young: Does the Secretary of State recognise that although the title of his statement is "Health and social care", only 12 words in it were about the major providers of social care in this country—local authorities? Does he recognise that they are spending billions over their standard spending assessment on social services, withdrawing preventive work, intervening only in life-threatening cases, pushing up charges and piling pressure on the council tax? Would it not have been better to share the proceeds of growth more evenly between the national health service and social services?

Michael Gove: I will come back to the hon. Lady in just one second because it is important that she realises the scale of this Government's failure.
	We now have the tragedy of more than a million young people not in employment, education or training: wasted talent let down by a system this Government failed to reform. Ministers, and ambitious Back Benchers, cannot deny the scale of this failure, for one of their own has acknowledged it. According to Lord Adonis, a Minister in the Secretary of State's Department, a quarter of secondary schools in this country are "wasting pupils' talents". Some 800,000 pupils are in schools that, according to Ministers, are simply unacceptable. As Mrs. Alistair Campbell wrote in  The Guardian this week:
	"With friends like Lord Adonis, Ed Balls and Gordon Brown don't need enemies".
	How fortunate for the Secretary of State that, after last week, no one else in the Labour party is at all unhappy with him.

Michael Gove: I have no idea from where on earth the hon. Lady gets that idea. We support good schools, wherever they exist in the state system, and oppose the Secretary of State's attempt to undermine them. Wherever there are good schools, we will back them rather than undermine them for party political reasons. We are not selective about championing excellence.
	In his preface to the education White Paper, the former right hon. Member for Sedgefield argued that,
	"reforms must build on the freedoms that schools have increasingly received, but extend them radically. We must put parents in the driving seat for change and to underpin this change, the local authority must move from being a provider of education to being its local commissioner and the champion of parent choice."
	He wanted
	"genuinely independent schools in the state sector".
	I could not put it better myself. The case for reform is clear, urgent, modern and rejected by the Secretary of State.
	In his first statement to the House, the Secretary of State slammed the brakes on reform. Academies were told that they could not open if Labour local councillors wanted to deny parents that choice. Far from being built on, freedoms were further restricted. New academies were told that innovation would be stifled and that they would have to follow a much more restricted curriculum. Since then, he has moved backwards further and faster. In his speech to the Labour party conference, he played to the left-wing gallery, making it clear that the educational establishment would stifle innovation, encouraging Labour LEAs to take an even bigger role in interfering in schools and slamming the door on genuine independence for new state schools and genuine choice and control for parents.
	The Secretary of State cannot provide the change that the country needs because he has made himself a prisoner of the forces of educational conservatism. He has even fallen back on the lamest mantra of them all—a line so hackneyed that even the Prime Minister felt he had to abandon it as too threadbare a cliché. The Secretary of State said that he believes in "standards not structures", but, as Tony Blair was forced to concede,
	"I shifted from saying 'it's standards not structures' to realising that school structures... affect standards."
	That is the truth that the Secretary of State denies, and why he is doomed to fail.
	What makes the failure worse is that, at the same time as the Secretary of State thwarts any chance of structural reform, he fails to drive though a genuine improvement in standards. Indeed, he does the opposite. Far from using every lever at his disposal to insist on rigour and excellence, he has been afraid to take on the establishment that presides over mush and muddle in our curriculum.
	On the Secretary of State's watch, we have been told that children should have five-minute lessons because they cannot pay attention for longer. His bureaucrats said that children should mark each other's work because that is more liberating and his people took Churchill out of the curriculum because he was no longer considered relevant to today's children. Our most courageous Prime Minister no longer relevant? I suppose I can understand why this Government would want him written out of history. What happened only when we objected to the change—not before? The Secretary of State rang round the newspapers, shifted the blame on to his officials, said that he was not consulted and promised to change course. Not, I think, your finest hour, Secretary of State.
	A Secretary of State who was determined to drive up standards would put rigour back in the curriculum and give children the chance to take pride in our national story. However, under this Secretary of State, there has been a refusal to show any courage in taking on the entrenched interests who stand in the way of excellence. I fear that he has been interested in only low partisan politics and shallow tactical positioning.
	We have had no leadership on reform or standards and no honesty about funding. Only yesterday, the Chancellor of the Exchequer failed to level with us in his pre-Budget report—a document that would earn a fail in any examination for being copied from someone else's work. We were promised an extra £250,000 on personalised learning for every pupil, but that amounts to only £34 for every school student—just enough to buy a copy of "Courage" by Gordon Brown and pay for 20 minutes of teaching time. With that book and only 20 minutes, one could probably help any class learn the meaning of "hubris".

Tom Levitt: The hon. Gentleman mentioned the pre-Budget report and the comprehensive spending review. Is he defending Tory party policy of putting £2 billion into the hands of 9,000 of the country's richest families rather than investing it in health and education, as the Government will do?

Michael Gove: I am glad to see that the ghost of education policy past has now become the spirit of fearless truth, in pointing out that the Government have failed to deliver on time and that it is time they thought again. I pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman's candour in at last finding the courage, valuable virtue as it is, to criticise the Government.
	To add insult to injury on funding, the Government are now clawing back money with a retrospective levy that plunders the balances of good schools to fund their own agenda. Sharp practice and hypocrisy, excellence penalised and central control stifling good practice—a perfect snapshot of Labour's attitude to education. So no progress on structural reform, no bravery on standards, no honesty on funding—what does that leave as the Balls agenda? Naked, narrow partisanship.
	In an interview that the Secretary of State gave to the  New Statesman in 2006, when he was still just a humble Back Bencher—well, a Back Bencher anyway—he explained why he disliked more independence for schools, distrusted the reform agenda and disagreed with the stewardship of the Department for Education and Skills under the right hon. Member for Bolton, West. What was needed, he said, was to
	"get back to a clear dividing line on education policy"—
	not constructive reform, not a consensus for change, not children first, but division as our future.
	Since that time, the Secretary of State has been as good as his word. Conservatives and Liberal Democrats now agree on the need for greater parental choice and control. Even the right hon. Member for Darlington (Mr. Milburn), the man who was campaign co-ordinator the last time Labour actually won an election, now agrees with us. Modernisers in every party now champion the case for greater parental control. There is a growing consensus for change, but the Secretary of State wants to divide and just says no.
	There is another consensus as well. All three parties were agreed that a pointless assault on existing good schools was a distraction from the key issue of our time, improving education for the most disadvantaged and for those in failing schools. But what has happened under this Secretary of State? On Saturday—I wonder why it was then—the press were briefed by his Department:
	"Labour wants to reignite the political row over selective education by making it easier to force the closure of...local grammar schools."
	How cynical can one get? When their judgement was found wanting, their egotism backfiring and their hubristic plans imploding, what do these Ministers do? They try to reignite a political row, try to sow division and try to shut down good schools. Instead of learning from what makes schools successful and arguing for the adoption of appropriate policies across the state sector, as we have, with our comprehensively excellent campaign, they prefer to play silly political games and abdicate their responsibility to govern in the whole national interest. They prefer the easy course of pursuing class war to the hard work of securing improvements in every classroom.
	But then, that is all of a piece with the cynicism that the Secretary of State has brought to his office. Invited on the radio to discuss our children's future, all he was really interested in was his clique's future. He talked of election timing and mused on where the "gamble" would be, treating the serious business of government as though it were a casino game in which they could treat people as mere counters to be shoved around at their convenience. But when the chips were down, the Government folded. They were tried and found wanting, tested and found hollow, totally incapable of being trusted anymore. It is time for real change that puts pupils and parents first. It is time for the Conservative agenda.

Edward Balls: I beg to move, To leave out from 'House' to the end of the Question, and to add instead thereof:
	'commends the real and substantial improvements achieved over the past decade in educational standards and welcomes the Government's commitment to a world class education for all; applauds the unprecedented investment in education over this period, so that per pupil revenue spending has increased nationally by £1,840 per pupil (66 per cent.) in real terms between 1997-98 and 2007-08 and that by 2010-11 there will have been a seven fold increase in real terms in capital investment since 1996-97; acknowledges the proportion of pupils achieving the required standard in English at age 11 increased from 63 per cent. in 1997 to 80 per cent. in 2007 and in maths from 62 per cent. to 77 per cent.; further acknowledges that the proportion of pupils achieving five good GCSEs (at A*-C grades) increased from 45.1 per cent. in 1997 to 58.5 per cent. in 2006 and from just 35.6 per cent. to 45.3 per cent. for those achieving five good GCSEs including English and maths; notes that in 1997 there were 616 schools where less than 25 per cent. of pupils achieved five good GCSEs and that this number fell to 47 in 2006; welcomes the proposal to raise the participation age for education or training to 18 years; further welcomes the launch of the first five Diplomas as a key step towards this objective; and further commends the 10 Year Youth Plan and the creation of the Department for Children, Schools and Families, bringing together strategic leadership for all services to drive up standards, tackle poverty and ensure all children and young people have a safe, secure and happy childhood.'.
	May I say that it is a great pleasure to debate the track record of the Department for Children, Schools and Families, just three months after it was established back in July? Notwithstanding today's Opposition motion, which I shall come to later, or the rather Punch and Judy, pugnacious speech that the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) gave, I welcome the courteous and serious way in which he and the hon. Member for Yeovil (Mr. Laws) have taken up their new shadow responsibilities since July and the support that they have given the new Department. I am grateful to them for the proper and helpful discussions that we have had over the complex issues around safeguarding and the work of Sir Roger Singleton in recent months. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Surrey Heath for the honest and mature way in which he praised the achievements of our A-level students this summer, in marked contrast with previous shadow Ministers.
	I also welcome the hon. Gentleman's support for our new independent standards regulator, which I announced two weeks ago. I also welcome his blessing for the review of speech and language therapy being led, with his full support, by our mutual friend, the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow). So despite today's motion, I am pleased to stand across the Dispatch Box from the hon. Member for Surrey Heath. In spite of our differences, it is my hope that we can make more progress in the coming months to forge a deeper and wider consensus on what needs to be done to give every child the best start in life and to give every young person the chance to fulfil their potential.
	Just three months after the Department was first established, I hope that the hon. Member for Surrey Heath and hon. Members on all sides of the House can agree that we have made some real progress. Since July we have welcomed the best key stage 2, GCSE and A-level results ever; we have expanded personalised learning and launched Every Child a Writer to help children in primary schools who are falling behind; we have reformed the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority to establish a new independent standards regulator; we have raised the bar on standards for discipline and introduced new powers for head teachers to tackle truancy and bullying; we have signed up 12 additional universities to get involved in sponsoring academies; we have opened our first 30 trust schools; we have launched our first five new diplomas; we have set out a 10-year plan to transform youth services; we have introduced new standards for school meals and more hours of school sports; and we have started a national children's plan consultation. The Department is showing that it is a strong and effective voice not just for better education, but for every child and parent in this country.

David Evennett: I am listening carefully to the Secretary of State, as I used to do when he had his former job in the Treasury. He has given us a catalogue of what he considers to be the great successes. If there has been so much success, why are so many of our children failing to read and write and failing in maths at the age of 11? If everything is so wonderful, what has gone wrong to allow this to happen?

Edward Balls: In a sec.
	As the hon. Member for Surrey Heath said, we should start by agreeing that, despite the substantial progress that we have made, there is still some way to go before our education system can be described as world class. The hon. Gentleman is right to point out that fact today. He is right to point out that 23 per cent. of young people are leaving primary school at 11 without having reached level 4 in maths, that the figure is 33 per cent. for writing, that 40 per cent. are not reaching level 4 in reading, writing and maths at key stage 2, and that too many 16 to 18-year-olds are leaving school and college without proper qualifications. I agree that that is not good enough.
	Putting the debating points to one side, let us go back and look at the history. In 1997, it was not 20 per cent. failing to make the grade in maths; it was 38 per cent. In 1997, it was not 20 per cent. not making the grade in reading, but 33 per cent., and it was not 40 per cent. not making the grade in the three Rs, but 57 per cent. So let us agree that, although we have further to go be world class, we are going in the right direction and we have made substantial progress from what was a desperate, taxing inheritance.
	I hope the hon. Gentleman will also agree that the reason we have made substantial progress since 1997 is our investment and our reforms. We have 38,000 new teachers and more than 100,000 more teaching assistants, and more than 1,100 new schools have been built rebuilt or refurbished. There has been a 25 per cent. fall in permanent exclusions. Another fact not reflected in the hon. Gentleman's motion is that the number of failing schools—those which do not have 25 per cent. of students gaining five good GCSEs—is down from 616 in 1997 to just 47 today. I want to go further: I want to get rid of all of them, but the fact is that there were 616 when his party left office, and the figure is now down to 47.

Angela Watkinson: The Secretary of State just touched on the subject of exams, and I wonder whether he shares the concerns of the head teachers in my constituency about the quality and consistency of online exam marking. A growing number of actual grades are varying significantly from the predicted grades; this is happening to a worrying degree. Some of the exam boards are now moving to oral online marking. If this situation is not reviewed and monitored, the problem is likely to increase.

Edward Balls: If the hon. Lady goes to the House of Commons Library, she will find out that the capital allocation for her local authority area is up 5,000 per cent. since 1997. On the particular point that she has raised, the reform that I have announced in recent weeks to establish an independent standards regulator will give parents and teachers the confidence that the exam boards are doing a good job and that standards are not declining. I will make sure that the standards regulator looks at the precise issue she has raised.

David Laws: Now we know what all the extra people whom the Labour party has been hiring in recent weeks have been doing: they have been going around collecting copies of Newington Liberal Democrat "Focus" leaflets.
	I do not disagree with any of that. I was trying to get the Government's position on the record, but I was also trying to tease out the view of the Secretary of State and his Department on why academies are a good thing, if that is what they really believe. I should also like to hear later whether the Secretary of State wishes the powers and freedoms of academies to be extended to schools.
	The Secretary of State is waving the leaflet. I should be delighted to look at it later, although I see all these things before they are sent out anyway.
	The Secretary of State may wish to intervene on another issue, that of reform of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority and its independence. I am delighted by this further magpie move by the Government—for I may give credit to the Conservative party on this occasion. It is rare for the pinching process to work in this way, but the hon. Member for Surrey Heath, at least, has claimed that he advocated the policy some time ago. I am delighted to say that my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, West (Stephen Williams) advocated a similar policy in August, and was condemned by the Schools Minister for trying to undermine confidence in the examination system.
	I think it is a good thing that the Government are to seek to make a portion of the QCA more independent. There has been a breakdown of confidence in the examination system in recent years, and this move may have a real effect. Many educational institutions, particularly private schools and high-performing state schools, are considering opting out of the existing qualifications framework altogether. That is worrying, because we risk a return to the days when the Secretary of State and I were at school, when there were different qualifications for people with different abilities. We do not want to discover that the existing qualifications are regarded as second-grade, and only for some schools.
	I do not believe that the Secretary of State has yet published his consultation paper on the independence of part of the QCA. If I have missed it, I apologise. We look forward to playing an active part in the consultation on the independent model that the Secretary of State proposes. I ask him, however, to retain an open mind on whether additional elements of the management of our education system could do with rather less politics, and rather more of the expertise we have seen in some of the other models that the Government cited in the letter that the Secretary of State kindly sent to us on the day of his conference speech, letting us know of the proposed changes to the QCA.
	In paragraph 8 of the letter, the Secretary of State said that
	"the Government's approach has been to develop transparent frameworks for decision-making by an accountable body".
	That related to other changes, including the change in the position of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England, one of the policies in which the Secretary of State was particularly involved in 1997. The Secretary of State proceeded to develop the argument, explaining that he sought to do the same in respect of the QCA changes.
	The problem with the changes that the Secretary of State is making is that—as I think he would be the first to admit—they are far more modest than the Monetary Policy Committee changes, which transferred a major area of decision making to a separate body in relation to policy, with overarching strategic control from the Government. As the Secretary of State is honest enough to admit in paragraph 9, the proposal for the QCA, although worthwhile, is indeed far more modest—namely the creation of
	"a distinct independent regulator of qualifications and tests."
	Creating a regulator is very different from seeking to establish a greater distance between the decisions of Ministers and decisions about what type of education obtains in every school in the country.
	I believe that all sorts of additional elements could be included in the Secretary of State's independent model which would allow us to engage in more sensible, intelligent, rational debate about the curriculum, and might lead to more independent sampling of pupils over periods of time to judge whether examination standards or pupils are changing. We should also be thinking, at least, about whether not a reformed QCA but the type of education standards authority that we were beginning to discuss when the Secretary of State came along and announced his policy—

Anne Main: I should like to be able to say that it is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman), but I had trouble understanding some of the rules and regulations that he seemed to lay down about where people should send their children to be educated. However, I agreed with the hon. Member for Yeovil (Mr. Laws) when he said that there has been far too much politics in education and teaching over the years—a fact that I can endorse fully.
	When I was a teacher in an inner-London secondary school, all classes had to be mixed ability, even though some children could barely read and write. Teaching such children was not an edifying task, and I still admire the way in which teachers struggle with pupils who are similarly ill equipped for secondary school. Mixed ability classes remain, and because of the absence of a system based on sets or streams that suit individual children teachers cannot teach to a child's ability.
	Teaching is a hard job. I attended my local state school, and I am grateful to have been lucky enough to be taught well there. I get heartily sick, as do many of my colleagues, of the issue of where we go to school being used as a political football. Having taught in an inner-London comprehensive school, I suggest that it would be more edifying if more people focused not on where we went to school but on what our schools are like and talked to teachers doing the job.
	Teaching is a hard job and we cannot thank teachers enough. They have put up with so much rubbish being thrown their way over the years. They have had experimental schemes, such as the initial teaching alphabet in reading. They have had to teach mixed-ability groups, even though no one knew whether the system would work or how to help them to make it work. Now we have massive school discipline problems.
	Like many mums and dads, I have been a parent governor and a parent helper, helping pupils to read and so on. Teaching is hard work and there is always challenging behaviour, but teachers are not helped by some of the regulations that stop them removing challenging pupils. The Conservatives propose that schools should be able to exclude pupils who repeatedly flout school rules.
	Many parents have to draw up home-school agreements, but realise that they are not worth the paper they are written on, not because of a lack of good intentions on all sides—from the pupil, the parent and the school—but because the school has absolutely no sanction to ensure that agreements are implemented. Pupils who do not want to engage productively in education, whose life mission is to disrupt the education of others—I have taught some of them—quickly wise up to the fact that there is little that the school can do. Their attitude is, "You can't get rid of me, guv". Schools can do little to ensure that such pupils stop making the lives of teachers and other pupils a misery.
	I wish there was a formula for totting up the number of wasted classroom hours and opportunities, the missed trips and the lack of creative work because of the disruptive pupil at the back who will not allow the class to study. Such a system would show why some teachers have been tearing their hair out over the years. Many teachers would welcome being given back the authority that they used to have but which has been undermined by slack uniform policy, and by policies that schools cannot enforce or that are flouted by parents or pupils.
	We need firm and reasonable home-school agreements, but if, once all opportunities have been exhausted, the school wants to exclude a pupil, it should be able to do so. The exclusion should not be overturned by some other body, to the annoyance of the school, which then has to take back a pupil who is waving a metaphorical two fingers in the air and continues to behave disruptively. I urge that aspect of our policy on the Secretary of State and hope that he will focus his energies on school discipline, not through sanctions but by giving power back to schools to run things as they see fit.
	I struggled with the hon. Member for Huddersfield's assertion that people do not want to send their children to inner-city schools. Some of the best schools in my area are in the inner city. I am not a geographical person. I believe that what makes good schools and good learning practice are teachers, pupils and parental support, not necessarily the location of the school and whether it has state of the art equipment.
	We should not deprive our schools of what they need to do their task, but I am sometimes amazed that people who pontificate about what our schools most need often look only at statistics and not at the value added in schools by hard-working teachers. I recognise the irritation expressed in the sedentary comments of some of my hon. Friends when they hear claims that we have been referring to "failing" schools. It is the pupils who are failed, not the school or teachers who are failing. Pupils are failed by our inability to ensure that they have the right learning atmosphere in school. That is what we have to tackle.
	I am an old-fashioned girl. I went to a Church primary school; it was tiny, and older and younger pupils were taught in the same space—we did not have separate classrooms—but the teaching was excellent. Why? It was because the school had an ethos of excellence supported by parents and pupils. If we did not behave at school we were quickly sent home, and if my parents thought I had been in trouble at school—God forbid—I soon knew about it.
	The atmosphere at my school was completely supportive. Parents left out of the equation, or who feel helpless, often tell me that they cannot make their child do things because the child knows he can get away it. We need to ensure that schools are given back the power to re-establish relationships.
	Funding is especially difficult for schools. Serious consideration has been given to special educational needs funding in Hertfordshire—a subject about which I am passionate and which the Conservatives have explored. Special educational needs cover a wide spectrum. It is hugely positive, encouraging and inclusive for some pupils to be educated in the mainstream state system, but other pupils do not have that experience. I have met families whose severely autistic children have been statemented. The parents wanted to take their SEN funding to a special school that met their child's needs. Like me, they believe firmly that each child should be taught according to their ability in the school that the parent feels is right, which includes an education that is tailored to the child's needs. We should not try to insist that every child is shoe-horned into mainstream education under an inclusiveness policy that actually excludes the child, who may simply sit at the back of the class unable to participate fully.
	I am sure that we have all heard of hard cases—of parents asking whether they can take their SEN funding to a special needs school. Unfortunately, the pendulum seems to have swung in quite the other direction and parents can no longer take the funding to the school of their choice. I feel passionately that there should be more special needs schools.
	We should have excellence in schools, but we cannot produce it simply by measuring the number of targets that have been met. Our teachers have been bogged down by targets. The only target should be whether a pupil leaves their education happy, having developed and achieved their potential and can engage in a productive working life with employers who recognise their qualifications.
	I am extremely concerned about the idea that we should force young people to remain at school until 18. Having taught truculent 15-year-olds, who have no interest whatever in gaining formal qualifications, I imagine that teaching truculent 18-year-olds would be far worse. The first school at which I taught was in Feltham. Its pupils were not high achievers academically, but many of them were hugely engaged by the car maintenance classes. They learned craft or job-based skills, which they might not necessarily use when they left school, and it was recognised that such courses were better for them than subjects to which they were not suited.
	If we insist that pupils remain at school until they are 18, the Secretary of State will need a radical rethink of the curriculum; otherwise, there will be a raft of pupils and parents at loggerheads with the local authority, because young adults will be forced to attend school rather than to choose what they want to do with their lives. Compulsion at that age is not the right way forward and I am extremely concerned about the proposal. I shall watch its progress with interest.
	I am fully aware that other Members want to speak, so I shall conclude my remarks.

Graham Stuart: It is a pleasure to be back in the House and to find that we are discussing education so early in this parliamentary Session. I am glad to see that the Secretary of State has come down from his excitement about general elections and stopped running around the studios telling everyone that there should be one. He indulged in partisan banter in his conference speech and gave the most humiliating and poor performance in a television studio. Anyone who has not seen it should go to YouTube and search for "IDS versus a load of Balls". They should be able to find the interview and see that the Secretary of State was not fulfilling the requirements of his position.
	However, the Secretary of State came to the House today in a spirit of humility, perhaps as a result of his recent experiences, and he was honest about standards. Although many Labour Members were crying out that the Conservatives should not throw light on areas where the current education system is not doing well enough, it turns out that the Secretary of State repeated the key statistic that appears in today's motion—that nearly half of pupils are leaving primary school without the educational attainment that we on both sides of the House hoped to see.
	The Conservatives have been clear about the need for greater independence in the setting up of schools and about encouraging more academies. Today's debate has served a purpose by slowly getting the new Secretary of State to turn around from his attitude that structures do not matter and to recognise that they do. Although in his speech he showed no enthusiasm for the academies programme, in his answers to the questions from the Liberal Front Bench, he started to express enthusiasm. We are excited by the prospect of setting schools free and by the belief that those areas of the country where we see the poorest performance, often in inner cities, where local authorities and the Government have not managed to provide adequate opportunities for kids, there is an exciting programme of innovation and change, with parents having a stronger role in determining how schools are run.
	The Conservatives will help that by removing the requirement for external donations. We want a single academy contract so that outside providers can run nationwide networks of schools to a high standard, allowing pupil choice—a word that did not appear once in the Secretary of State's speech—to help drive change. I do not know whether this is true of colleagues in the House, but I do not see choice as an end in itself. I see choice as the lever of change, which parents in areas where the schools are not good enough can use to raise standards. Parental choice can be exercised to insist on new schools and on changes to schools that are failing. That is the point of the change agenda. It is not an end in itself; it is about raising standards.
	That is why we are excited about the new academies. The Secretary of State is not quite there yet. We want to see whole-class teaching, streaming and setting. We want robust discipline brought back. We do not want rhetoric from the Government. We want the reality. We know that even in the toughest areas, traditional teaching can work. We do not want a return to the 11-plus. Our party has not got itself into a knot about that. We are focused on improving standards in all schools, and we believe that the points that I have made are the way to do that.

Graham Stuart: I do not have time to do so and I will end up stealing someone else's time, so if the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I shall press on.
	There seems to be movement from the Government on synthetic phonics, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) has pushed for some time. It was kind of the Liberal Democrat spokesman, the hon. Member for Yeovil (Mr. Laws), to credit the Conservatives with having pushed that forward. We also believe in a rigorously enforced uniform policy, strict standards of discipline, a strong ethos in the school, and setting by ability throughout the school. The Minister recently stressed that parents from low income families should not find themselves unable to afford that uniform. I hope that he will not contradict our desire for a strong uniform policy, which should be mediated by common sense—I am glad to see him nod.
	The Minister would not expect me to do otherwise than raise the issue of education funding. I have done so on many occasions in private meetings and in debates with the Minister. Beverley and Holderness, which is part of the East Riding of Yorkshire, has the fourth lowest education funding in the country. The gap between the best funded authorities and the lowest funded is growing. None of us deny that the best measures of deprivation available to any Government should be used, but the fact that the gap between places like the East Riding and other areas should increase over time is deeply regrettable. I pay tribute to the fact that despite very low funding and the costs of delivering education in a rural area—on which the Minister has previously commented, for which I am grateful to him—and thanks to the teachers, the pupils and the effort made by the Conservative-run East Riding of Yorkshire council, together they have delivered significant, consistent and ongoing improvements in standards. I do not want to take a private comment out of turn, but the Minister might say that doing so well with so little diminishes the strength of the argument for having more. That is not true, however, because money should go to where it can best be used. In the East Riding of Yorkshire, our schools have shown that they can do very well.
	I have mentioned to the Minister that Beverley grammar school, which is a comprehensive school in Beverley, Beverley high school and Longcroft school are three outstandingly successful schools. The head teachers from all three schools have mentioned their demoralisation as they try to deal with the funding pressure. I hope that the Minister will examine that issue.
	In an earlier intervention, I mentioned the cross-border issue, and I will not miss this opportunity to ask the Minister to re-examine it. That issue may be at the margin, but every pupil who leaves a deprived area of Hull and attends an East Riding school should bring with them some of the funding to provide the extra support that they may well need. That would not be a huge change. The comprehensive spending review has just been announced, and there is an opportunity to make that change in the interests of justice. I know that such a change would be extremely popular in my local area, and it would create gratitude among local people towards the Labour Government.
	Finally—I am sure that I will be waved at, if I am using too much time—I want to discuss skills. As the Minister knows, the Leitch review, which was commissioned in 2004, produced the report, "Skills in the UK: the long-term challenge". The report congratulated the Government on positive aspects of the education system, but it also pointed out that more than one third of working-age adults in the UK do not have a basic school-leaving qualification, that 5 million adults have no qualifications at all and that one in six adults do not have the literacy skills expected of an 11-year-old. The Government have rightly pointed out the need to improve skills, because the number of unskilled jobs will decrease dramatically in the next 20 years. In my local area, FE colleges have experienced funding pressures, and they see a discrepancy between how schools are treated and how they are treated. Adult courses are a way to feed adults with low skills back into education, but such courses have been closed down and people have been priced out. Given the comprehensive spending review, this is an opportune time for the Minister to address some of those issues.
	I have said that I will not speak for overly long, so I will draw my remarks to a close. The new CSR is out and a new Secretary of State is in post. We need to support the innovation of academies and set schools free. We also need a Secretary of State who speaks with the same passion about the need to raise school standards as he does about the destruction of the Conservative party. I hope that the improvement in standards is more of a reality for the Secretary of State than the disappearing chance of a disappearing Conservative party.

Nick Gibb: This has been an excellent debate with a thrilling and strong opening by my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove). Of all the public services, education has the greatest impact in shaping lives, promoting opportunity and ensuring economic strength. If we get education right today, we can be confident about the kind of society that we will have in 20 years' time.
	Today's debate takes place after more than 10 years of a Labour Government, who promised that "education, education, education" would be their priority and whose manifesto promised "zero tolerance of underperformance". I shall quote the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, in his famous 1996 Labour party conference speech:
	"We are 35th in the world league table of education standards. 35th. They say give me the boy at 7 and I'll give you the man at 70. Well give me the education system that's 35th in the world today and I'll give you the economy that's 35th tomorrow."
	The Secretary of State has demanded an acknowledgment that there has been an improvement since 1997, and I am happy to provide it. There has been a modest improvement, but instead of 35th in the world, we are now 29th on the same World Economic Forum league table. We are behind Belgium, Japan, New Zealand, Indonesia, Australia, Cyprus, France and Malta. We used to be ahead of the United States, but we are now 14 places behind it; we used to be ahead of China, but we are now behind both China and India, the great emerging economic giants. I ask myself whether this is the extent of Labour's ambition: an education system that is 29th in the world, and therefore an economy that will be 29th in the world tomorrow. There has been a modest improvement, yes, but not on the scale promised in 1997 and not on the scale that we need if we are to compete in the knowledge economy of the new world.
	Yes, standards of reading have risen from 63 per cent. in 1996 to 80 per cent. today, but one in five children still leave primary school unable to read properly. There is no excuse for that; in deprived parts of the country, there are primary schools with challenging intakes which get 100 per cent. of their children to level 4 in English. Some 40 per cent. of children leave primary school not having reached the expected level in reading, writing and maths combined; that same 40 per cent. go on to fail to achieve five good GCSEs.
	Yes, there has been a modest improvement in GCSE results: 45 per cent. achieved five or more GCSEs in 1997, while 58 per cent. do so today. However, when we include English and maths, the figure is only 45 per cent., and if science is added in, it is only 40 per cent. The gap between the headline figure and the figure including English, maths and science has risen from 10 per cent. in 1997 to 18 percentage points today. Most alarming of all, the figure for 15-year-olds achieving a grade C or higher in English, maths, science and a language has actually fallen, from 27 per cent. in 1997 to 25.7 per cent. today.
	The hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman) was right to point out the importance of the tests and how they reveal some deep-seated problems. It was refreshing to hear the hon. Member for Yeovil (Mr. Laws); with Liberal Democrat education policy under his stewardship, I think there will be a growing consensus between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservative party, given that they are now in favour of academies.
	The right hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Sir Gerald Kaufman) spoke passionately about education in his constituency. He mentioned particularly William Hulme's grammar school, which I have also visited and which is now in the state sector. In a thoughtful speech, my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart) pointed out the importance of setting by ability, of whole-class teaching and of good discipline and behaviour.
	The problem with this Government is that in recent weeks they have focused too much on spin, and in the past 10 years they have focused too much on eye-catching initiatives. If the Government really want to raise standards in our schools, they need to challenge the ideology that has dominated the educational establishment during the past 30 or 40 years. That ideology led to "look and say" methods of teaching children to read, so that now 23 per cent. of adults cannot read the dosage on an aspirin bottle.
	To say such things is not, as the hon. Member for Huddersfield suggested, to talk down the education system, but to point out the realities—

Jim Knight: I welcome today's debate and thank hon. Members for their insightful contributions, which I shall try to comment on in a moment.
	My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has outlined the significant progress that has been made in our schools over the past few years since our dodgy inheritance from the Conservative party, but as he has also acknowledged, we know that our education system is not yet world class. While we have many outstanding examples of schools, with more children and young people than ever before performing to their best at school, we want excellence to be the standard available to all so that each child has the opportunity to fulfil their potential.
	We want to deliver genuine opportunity for all, overcoming attainment gaps and eradicating child poverty, ensuring that outcomes are determined by talent and hard work and building a fair society and a culture which celebrates success. Thanks to unprecedented investment over the past 10 years, and the immense dedication of all those who work in schools, we have exceptionally strong foundations to build on. We will continue to sharpen our focus on ensuring that every pupil gets a personalised education, responsive to their individual needs and supportive of their individual talents. We will get each child off to the best possible start in life by giving them the skills they need to thrive in the modern world.
	Because we believe that learning is a right and not a privilege, and that everyone should have the opportunity to benefit from this right until at least the age of 18 as a precursor to a successful adult life, we will be legislating to extend this right to every single young person in England, and in doing so we will raise aspirations and galvanise the whole system to do better for our young people. We are prepared to put in the necessary investment to realise those bold ambitions, creating the world-class education system supportive of every unique individual that this Government are determined to deliver and to which Conservative Members only pay lip service.
	The Opposition run down our achievements, while their spending plans make it very clear where their priorities lie. Their proposals to raise the inheritance tax threshold to £1 million would cost £3 billion, delivering £2 billion pounds in benefits to their old school friends in the richest 5,000 estates. By contrast, our priorities are to invest in a fair level of inheritance tax, and put the remaining £2 billion into health and education—proposals that properly meet the aspirations of the public for the future of their family, not just at the end of their lives but at the beginning of their children and grandchildrens' lives too. That is an investment in everyone's future, rather than immediate cashback for the wealthy.
	What do our passion and priority for education mean to our constituents? One thing they all see is new schools. My capital announcement today means that by the end of the latest spending period there will have been a sevenfold increase in investment in real terms since 1997.
	The new funding will go towards ensuring that our youngest children have the best possible learning environment—inspiring new buildings and integrated technology instead of the cramped classrooms, peeling paint and outside loos under the Tories. We can not only build 675 replacement primaries in England and more than 400 new secondaries, but provide new money for councils not yet in the Building Schools for the Future programme for special educational needs pupils and diplomas. We can also provide more money for school kitchens and, of course, £3 billion devolved straight to schools and more than £4.5 billion devolved to councils.
	In 1997, the Tories' whole capital budget was well short of only £1 billion. However, our determination is not only to create successful schools but to support strong and confident families, thus helping families to help themselves. How can children achieve in school if we do not do better for their health, safety and early development, and support their parents and carers? Through the children's plan, about which we are currently consulting, we draw on the expertise of all those who live with, work with and understand children in order best to address those genuinely tough issues.
	Through the 10-year youth strategy and its commitment of more than £650 million, we have signalled our intent to offer young people the opportunity to develop and grow through participating in positive activities beyond school. The Labour party—the Government—is committed to putting its money where its mouth is.
	We have had an engaging debate, although at times it has spread more heat than light. It was led by the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), who displayed a mastery of drama but gets no marks for history. He said that he wanted to set up more parent-promoted schools, but parents already have the power to establish schools under the Education and Inspections Act 2006. The first parent-promoted school, Elmgreen school in Lambeth, opened this September, with support from the Labour council and local Labour Members of Parliament. As it expands, it is due to move into a new building. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman can have a word with local Tory councillor Andrew Gibson, who opposes expanding a parent-promoted school.
	The hon. Member for Yeovil (Mr. Laws) made an interesting speech, which contrasted with that of the hon. Member for Surrey Heath. He asked about child poverty. It is the joint responsibility of the Department for Children, Schools and Families, the Department for Work and Pensions and Her Majesty's Treasury to tackle that. All three Departments take a joint lead and, as he said, we have a public service agreement target to halve child poverty by 2010 and eradicate it by 2020. The DWP is investing £150 million in helping parents get back into work, and our Department is improving education and access and funding to child care. On 2 August, £4 billion over three years was announced for children's centres and child care. That includes child care to support 50,000 parents into work or training.
	The Chairman of the Select Committee made a thoughtful speech and demonstrated why he commands respect from all hon. Members. The hon. Member for Surrey Heath needs to learn from that.
	The hon. Member for St. Albans (Anne Main) drew on her experience of teaching when the previous Government were in power. She supported abolishing exclusion appeals despite the inevitability of that increasing the number of cases that go to the courts and posing a huge threat to special educational needs pupils and their parents. It is up to local authorities to decide whether to keep open, replace or build special schools. Today, I have allocated £608 million to local authorities that are late in the Building Schools for the Future programme, asking them to spend it on diplomas and special educational needs provision in their areas.
	My right hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Sir Gerald Kaufman) spoke about the brain zone in his constituency. His intelligent speech was certainly in concert with that.
	The hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart) also contributed to the debate. I was delighted to visit his constituency last month, where I saw the effect of the June floods and the extraordinary efforts of staff in the school that I visited, led by their head teacher John Bennett. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman welcomes the £61.7 million that I have allocated to his local authority in my announcement today.
	The hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr. Gibb) made a thoughtful speech, which made me wonder why he had not been promoted to the position of shadow Secretary of State. However, he repeated the statistic regarding five A* to C grades, including English, maths, science and a language. The proportion of pupils studying a language has fallen because it is no longer compulsory—a change that was made in 1997. Using that statistic is therefore simply spin and the hon. Gentleman should be ashamed of himself for doing that.
	I welcome the opportunities offered by today's debate to acknowledge the commitment and dedication of all those working in our schools. I recognise that we have more to do to ensure that every child reaches their full potential through school and is able to find an education that inspires and motivates them beyond the age of 16. However, unlike the Conservative party, we have the answers—through our commitment to personalised learning, the package of reforms for young people, including the youth strategy, new, challenging choices to study diplomas and extending every young person's learning until the age of 18.
	The Conservatives are rich in rhetoric, good on gimmicks and poor in policy. They run down the achievements of pupils and teachers while offering nothing new. We have the policies to build the world-class education system to which we aspire. We will continue to invest in children, schools and families, to drive up standards and to give teachers the discipline powers for which they ask. We will continue to win the argument with the Opposition as we have done on selection, the curriculum, and early years.
	I therefore urge hon. Members to defeat the Conservatives in the Lobby by rejecting their vacuous motion.

Grant Shapps: My hon. Friend is right when he says that the scheme has been a fiasco from beginning to end. It is an exemplary example of a Government who have refused to listen to common sense. It is not just us that they have not listened to; they have not listened to the industry or the consumers, all of whom are lined up against this atrocious piece of legislation, which does not help anybody to buy or sell a house.

Grant Shapps: I want to make some progress.
	Where the Government have thrown the market into complete and utter turmoil, we have sent a clear signal that would end this bureaucratic nightmare of HIPs. As they have become increasingly discredited, the embarrassed Minister has tried to use energy performance certificates as a green fig leaf with which to cover up her embarrassment.
	We think that EPCs can be introduced more quickly and effectively without HIPs. Will the Minister explain why our approach was possible in Northern Ireland but not in England and Wales? On their own, energy performance certificates are a good thing. They mean that house buyers will have better information about their new homes. However, even the Government's Better Regulation Commission warned that the new regulations are imposing
	"additional administrative burdens without adequate justification"
	and go
	"beyond the requirements of the Directive",
	with
	"no supporting evidence to justify this 'gold-plating'."
	Does the Minister accept that damning indictment of her policy by the Government's own commission?
	We said that HIPS could increase the cost of moving home, that sellers would be put off, that housing supply would be restricted and that instability could rattle the marketplace. The letters and e-mails that I have received since the introduction of HIPS suggest that our concern was not misplaced, with agents reporting a shortage of three and four-bedroomed houses coming on to the market. A survey conducted by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors last month revealed that 73 per cent. of respondents had recorded that fewer three and four-bedroomed properties were becoming available than in the same month last year, and that new instructions requiring a HIP had decreased by 37 per cent. In the face of that compelling new evidence, will the Minister now concede that the introduction of HIPS has had a deeply detrimental impact on the housing market?

Yvette Cooper: I beg to move, To leave out from "House" to the end of the Question, and to add instead thereof:
	'believes that the ongoing reform of the home buying and selling process should revolve around the interests of the consumer and environmental sustainability; considers that the most important thing for the housing market is macroeconomic stability including sound public finances; therefore further believes that unfunded tax cuts including on stamp duty would be irresponsible; further believes that increased house building to deliver more affordable homes is essential to help first time buyers; further considers that the introduction of Home Information Packs and Energy Performance Certificates can improve the process of home buying and selling for consumers and provide them with vital information about the energy efficiency of homes and practical suggestions about how to cut fuel bills and reduce carbon emissions; and notes that the Government continues to work with industry to consider further reform of the home buying and selling process in order to maximise the benefits for consumers.'.
	I welcome the hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps) to what I believe is his first Opposition day debate. I also believe that he has just made his first parliamentary remarks on home information packs. I noticed that he and his party chose not to take up any of the opportunities to debate HIPs in July—in one of their Opposition day debates or by seeking an early date for Committee consideration of the regulations. Neither did he take up the opportunity to ask about HIPs or raise stamp duty during the first oral questions after his appointment. In fact, he did not raise housing at the first oral questions because he was not present; apparently, he was in a place called Ealing at the time. I am sure that he has fond memories of his important role in the Ealing campaign—I can certainly tell him that we do, and that we are always very happy to remind him of the role he played.
	The hon. Gentleman raised a series of points about HIPs and stability in the housing market. Although stamp duty is mentioned in his motion, he refrained from mentioning it, except when my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Rob Marris) referred to it.
	Home information packs and energy performance certificates are now in place for three and four-bedroomed properties. The Government set out a phased roll-out last May, which is now under way; more than 1,000 energy performance certificates have now been processed. I should point out that many of the calamities that Opposition Members predicted have not materialised. HIPs are not creating months of delay; in fact, the average time taken to compile a HIP is five to seven days, far faster than it takes to gather the same information under the old system.

Yvette Cooper: That is true but, if that is Opposition policy, it does not say much for their commitment to the environment. Consumers need to be aware of what more they can do to cut their carbon emissions as well as their fuel bills. After all, 27 per cent. of this country's carbon emissions come from our homes, and a lot of it comes from existing homes.
	It is important that people have up-to-date information. Shops such as Comet or Currys make sure that their fridges carry energy efficiency ratings. The introduction of those ratings mean that it is hard to find a fridge or washing machine that is not A rated. Those certificates have been important, as they have provided people in the market with information and an opportunity to make decisions accordingly. Given the serious climate change challenges we face, it is right that we provide people with such information. It is deeply unfortunate that Conservative Members are so opposed to the measures and have tried to water down energy performance certificates, which is why organisations such as the World Wide Fund for Nature and Friends of the Earth have been so critical of their approach.

Yvette Cooper: In other words, the hon. Gentleman grudgingly accepts energy performance certificates because he believes that he is being forced to do so by Europe. That is his approach. We think we are right to put energy performance certificates in place. They have been implemented earlier than in many other European countries because of the decisions we have taken.
	Members have also made points about the impact of the measures on the housing market and about stability in the housing market, which is an important issue. However, they are wrong to say that everything that has been happening in the housing market is the result of HIPs—although we understand why they are doing so. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr. Raynsford) has already pointed out, the housing market was quiet in many areas even before HIPs were introduced. Things were quiet throughout the market, even for one or two-bedroomed properties.
	Stability in the housing market is important, and the Government have to do what they can, through their areas of responsibility, to support it. That means doing what they can to support low mortgage rates through good macro-economic management and sound public finances. The measures in the motion tabled by the hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield would put that at risk. We know, of course, how the Conservatives screwed up in the past: mortgage rates hit 15 per cent. and remained at over 10 per cent. for many months at a time. As a result, 75,000 people lost their homes in one year alone. Part of the mismanagement that contributed to the recession was down to the Conservative Government's complete lack of control over the public finances.
	I repeat that the approach that the hon. Gentleman and other Opposition Members take to stamp duty is to set out a completely unfunded proposal, and that is part of creating a huge black hole in the public finances, which is irresponsible. There are unfunded proposals on inheritance tax and on tax cuts for the married, and the sums do not stack up. It does actually matter that Opposition Members' sums do not stack up. It matters to real people—to mortgage holders and homeowners. If the public finances do not stack up, and if one blows a hole in the public finances, interest rates and mortgage rates go up. It is not a game; it actually affects people in the real world. Serious parties that are interested in government have to take such matters into account. That is why the hon. Gentleman's approach is so irresponsible.
	Opposition Members chose the subject for debate. They talked about home information packs, and only marginally about stamp duty, because their views on HIPs are all that they have as housing policy. They are not prepared to face up to the serious decisions that have to be taken to promote housing market stability and help first-time buyers.

Claire Curtis-Thomas: Will my right hon. Friend confirm that her Department has invested a substantial amount of money in research on producing eco-friendly housing, and housing that is a net negative user of electricity, and which can indeed even export it? One of the reasons why we need energy performance certificates is so that we can start with existing housing stock and produce a far better environmental and carbon footprint. A consequence of that is investment in research and businesses who are interested in the environment.

Paul Holmes: It has long been clear that the introduction of home information packs was a shambles. That argument has been rehearsed many times, not only today, but back in the summer in this House and in the other place, and many times before. I shall not go into all the details again because we all know them.
	Suffice it to say, the introduction of HIPs is emblematic of this Labour Government and of a lack of transparency. Where are the reports that they carried out on the pilot studies before the introduction of HIPs? Why have they still not been shared with us and with the public? It is also emblematic of sheer incompetence. The introduction of this bungled scheme has cost the taxpayer about £20 million to date, and since the summer of 2006, we have seen three sets of regulations, a legal challenge from the professionals and the scrapping of the compulsory home condition reports.
	So much about HIPs remains clouded. When will the Minister release the results of those pilot tests? Why has there been such a delay? Since the legislation came into force, how long has it taken to put the packs together and how does that compare with the four to five days envisaged by the Government? The Minister said that the answer is seven to eight days. The scheme has been running for nine weeks, so for how many of those weeks and on how big a sample is that figure based? How much have the packs cost in reality, and how does that compare with the £400 average predicted by the Government? The Minister suggested that the answer is £300 to £350 on average so far, but on how many weeks and on how big a sample is that based? Given that this legislation has been so controversial, surely she should share this information and research with the House, so that we can reach an informed decision on HIPs and their future.
	The motion concentrates not so much on HIPs but on their effect on a fragile housing market. It seems to ignore the fact that a struggling housing market is the result of many other factors, including the lack of social housing to rent, which puts a huge upward pressure on house prices; the moratorium on council house building over the past 10 to 13 years; the lack of affordable housing, which also forces up house prices; the housing investment frenzy, whereby housing is increasingly seen as a speculative investment rather than as a home; the effect of, and crisis arising from, cheaper money generally; and the effect of the sub-prime market. When that hit the US, we were told that it would not be a problem in this country, yet a week later the Northern Rock disaster happened. How much more of that is still to feed through into the housing market?
	The Conservative motion does not mention any of that, and it seems to blame a fragile housing market on HIPs. It provides an answer by suggesting the scrapping of stamp duty for first-time buyers on houses up to £250,000. One obvious question is how to define a first-time buyer. If, for example, a divorced couple buy a house separately later, is either of them a first-time buyer? Is one of them a first-time buyer? If separated partners go on to buy a house with a new partner, and the new partner has never bought a house before, are the new couple first-time buyers or not?

Phyllis Starkey: May I add a couple of other examples that are not dealt with by the helpful intervention from the hon. Member for Rochford and Southend, East (James Duddridge)? First, an individual who was extraordinarily rich and had bought house cash in hand would not have a mortgage but would be able to masquerade as a first-time buyer. Secondly, what if someone got their child to buy a house, which they then bought from them? They would not really be a first-time buyer. The scope for defrauding the system is enormous.

Nick Raynsford: Of course the packs were provided free as part of the pilot, but the purpose of the pilot was to look at the process, to see whether or not it achieved benefits. I have to say to the hon. Gentleman that one of the problems in all of this is that people have bandied estimates of the cost of HIPs, particularly the house condition report, with very little understanding of what the process would involve if the scheme were introduced on a mandatory basis, and there were considerable competition in the market to secure custom.
	I do not think that the introduction of the current system was satisfactory—I have made that clear in speeches in the past, and I shall do so later. However, even now, a number of providers are offering either to provide the home information pack for free, or deferring the charge until the sale is completed, which removes completely the fear of cost that was used, I am afraid to say, by the Opposition among others to scaremonger. There are other elements, to which I shall return later, that provide scope for reducing costs to the public, and the public interest has been lost in much of the hysterical comment made about the scheme.

Robert Syms: I agree, but the Government should have some sort of target for doing the whole housing stock over a period of several, perhaps 10 or more, years. There might be a role for local government here. Why not fund some local authorities to ensure that the housing stock in their areas has a high percentage of energy performance certificates? Those with the highest percentage of housing with certificates should get some kind of benefit. If the carbon footprint and the environmental agenda are important, we have to deal with those aspects in homes, where so much energy is generated and wasted. At the moment, we are considering only a small percentage of the problem, so we can afford to broaden the argument and do substantially more by covering the whole housing stock.
	On the question of stamp duty for first-time buyers, we know that there are many concerns about young people not being able to get into the housing market. It is a great fear among many of my constituents, and we all know about the difficulties that youngsters face. We also know that many of them are buying at a rather older age—rather than the later 20s, it is the 34s and 35s who are buying—and some of that is down to lifestyle. People get married later; they want to do their own thing by going to Nepal or other places; they do not necessarily want to get into the housing market straightaway.
	I would say that even though the Conservative proposals are not the only answer to the problem, they are a help. As we all know, buying a home comes with all sorts of associated expenses—carpets and curtains, for example—and people who are buying a home for the first time because of a relationship or marriage often end up with children. We know that poverty usually hits those families with one or two children in the first years of marriage, often because one of the household incomes goes down if the wife has to give up work. Our proposals offer some help to people who are struggling at the beginning of their adult lives. Insofar as we can pick bits apart, that is fine; it is a debating point. Ultimately, most of us, as politicians, would hope that we can address the problem and help people who want to get on to the housing market. What we are doing is helping. I therefore commend what was proposed today by our shadow Minister for Housing and at our party conference. Even if the other parties in the House do not agree with the proposal, let us hope that it engenders public debate about how to address the issue. There is not an easy answer, but the matter is of real concern to our constituents and many young people.
	Given the shouting across the Dispatch Box earlier, it seems that housing will probably be a battleground of the future. Building millions of homes is not the answer; we have to manage our existing housing stock. A lot of houses are empty, and a lot are sub-standard and can be done up. One million flats over shops are not in use. Many people live in homes that are too large for them, and tax incentives could be used to bring some of the unused bedrooms and other rooms back into the system and offset some building.
	A report by the Town and Country Planning Association, with which the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich has been associated in the past—as president, I think—found that one of the factors in the need to build more houses is longevity. People are living longer not just in the south but in the north and across the UK, so if more houses have to be built to deal with that, they will have to be built across the UK.
	Management of our housing stock is just as important as building. Whatever figures Ministers use—2 million or 3 million—we must remember that it is one side of a complicated equation for the provision of decent, environmentally friendly housing stock for our electorate. Using existing stock more effectively is an important part of that.

Charles Walker: My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. If I wish to buy a house in the future, I will not take the word of someone acting on behalf of the vendor. I will want to have a good look at the house for myself. Therefore, I will still pay my solicitor to do my searches. It is a little like buying a car. When we buy a car, the seller says, "I've got the service history," but we reply, "That's very useful, but I'm still going to get the guy from the AA to come along and have a look under the hood."
	Many of the people I talk to about this measure are concerned that it is just yet another excuse to have more people working in a quasi-governmental role snooping round their homes. They say, "There will be yet more people I've got to have in my home looking behind the curtains, looking under the bed, telling me what I should be doing." There is not a huge appetite for that.
	Again, we can ask: what will happen to the information once it has been secured? Will the Government take ownership of it and use it at a later date to raise our council tax bands, or use it as an excuse to increase stamp duty? We do not know with this Government, because any excuse is always grabbed to put up the cost of things such as buying homes or to increase taxes. That is the way this Government work.
	If this Government were an honest Government, they would have had an election last week—but setting that aside, they would also realise that this measure has been an unmitigated disaster. It is so boring to come to the Chamber and hear former Ministers justify what they did before they were removed from office. The right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr. Raynsford) gave a lengthy exposition as to why the HIPs idea was so reasonable and good, but it is neither. Seven years have passed since he introduced it, but the faces of the few Labour Members still attending the debate make it clear that they know in their hearts that it is a disaster. Why do they not have the courage to say, "Look, we got it wrong. Let's get rid of this nonsense. We're very sorry we've wasted so many people's time, and that we've conned those poor men and women into giving up their jobs and spending £4,500 on training to become inspectors."
	Opposition Members are nothing but fair. We recognise that those people must be compensated, even though taxpayers' money would have to be used. We hate to see people disadvantaged—unlike the lot over there, who are quite happy to see millions of home owners every year disadvantaged by yet another tax. That is pretty thin gruel. Whenever the Prime Minister calls a general election, I think that people will let him know as much.

Clive Betts: I think the hon. Gentleman is referring not to surveys but to searches and my right hon. Friend the Minister dealt with that point. As HIPs come into effect and are more common and people understand them, the problem of buyers wanting second searches or second surveys will not arise. People will come to accept HIPs as a legitimate part of the process.
	There have been temporary hiccups in the introduction of the new scheme, but they are minor compared with what the Conservatives told us would happen. They said there would be Armageddon in the housing market; the market would collapse, no one would put their house up for sale and if they did it would take weeks to get the packs produced. No energy surveyors would be available and delays would result from the shortage. The cost would be £1,000 a time. That is what we were told over and over again, but what actually happened?
	My right hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich demolished the argument that houses would not come on to the market because of the introduction of HIPs. There is no evidence for that. The cost is not £1,000 but between £300 and £350 on average, including the energy performance certificates, which were not part of the original process. I hope that most people welcome the fact that we have those certificates even if they cannot agree that they should be part of the HIP process.
	There have not been long delays. There are plenty of energy surveyors able to do the work. All the disasters we were told would befall us when HIPs were introduced have not happened. There is not a shred of evidence.
	I have not had a single complaint from a constituent buying a house or from an estate agent since HIPs were introduced. I guess that is the case for most Members. We have had no complaints because the process was introduced far more smoothly than even I as a supporter of HIPs believed possible. That is the real situation.
	The hon. Member for Poole made a reasonable speech. He talked about energy performance certificates. It is right that they should be part of HIPs. We have at least introduced them, and an increasing number of houses will get them as buying and selling with HIPs proceeds. However, I agree with him that we have to consider what more we can do to roll out energy performance certificates for houses that probably will not come on to the market for a number of years. The Communities and Local Government Committee will hold an inquiry on energy conservation for existing homes; that is one of the issues that we want to take up. It was a reasonable point, and the Government ought to think about it.
	I agree with the hon. Gentleman that HIPs will not operate properly if they are used for only some houses. My solution is to get one and two-bedroomed properties into the HIP process as quickly as possible, not to scrap the process for properties with three or more bedrooms. However, he made a reasonable point, and the Government have to think about how quickly we can introduce the process, so that we can get more sense into the market. Of course, introducing HIPs for one and two-bedroomed properties is most likely to help first-time buyers, who tend to buy such properties, as there will be a transfer of cost from the people buying properties to people selling. So first-time buyers will benefit far more once smaller properties are brought into the system. My question for the Government is: how quickly can we get that done? We need it done as quickly as possible.
	Finally, I come back to home condition reports. I still believe that one of the fundamental problems with buying and selling a home in this country is that people not only make offers without knowing the condition of a property, but often buy it with only a minimal survey having been done. Such a survey will not reveal potential fundamental flaws with the property.  [Interruption.] Okay, we can all shout out, "buyer beware", but I believe that the Government have a responsibility to try to make sure that there are safeguards for people undertaking the most important purchase of their life. That is a different approach; Opposition Members are happy to leave it to the market, but I believe that we Members have a responsibility to our constituents in that process. We have a responsibility to bring in appropriate safeguards. Integrating home condition reports in the HIP process would achieve that, and I hope that the Government will eventually come to that point of view.

Ian Liddell-Grainger: I am staggered by some of the speeches that we have heard from Labour Members, and I am perturbed by the lack of a sense of reality that is coming through loud and clear. I want to put on record the situation in Bristol, which the Government have talked about.
	"There were 15,000 voluntary packs"
	sent out in Bristol,
	"only 250 of which had a home condition element."—[ Official Report, House of Lords, 11 October 2006; Vol. 685, c. 336.]
	None of them could be tested because there were not enough people to test them. Although there were 250 such packs, only 189 people participated, and only 90 sales were completed under the scheme, of which only 30 involved new properties. It was a shambles from beginning to end. I am sorry, but for the Government to say that they did a proper test is completely false. The words I quoted are those of Baroness Andrews, who was then—and still is—Under-Secretary of State, Department for Communities and Local Government.
	The situation has got out of hand. There is no doubt that it is getting ever more difficult for people to see the truth. Hon. Members have made some good interventions and speeches pointing out that there is total mistrust in the system. What Government in their right mind would suggest to people that they spend £4,500 to £8,000 getting a qualification when they know that it cannot be implemented, just because they have carried out a test in Bristol? The test was carried out under Government guidance—they put £320,000 into it for good measure—to see whether the system worked, and it did not. Surely the Government should not only compensate the people involved but apologise to them.
	I was staggered to hear what the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr. Raynsford) said, because I know perfectly well that last year he praised the quality of the teaching, saying that everyone who got the qualification would definitely get a job, and would earn a considerable amount of money—we have heard a figure of £70,000 bandied about, but in reality I do not think that anyone knew what the amount would be. For the Government to be stuck in this way is ridiculous.
	I would also like to take up the point on what the housing market has done. My hon. Friend the Member for Cotswold (Mr. Clifton-Brown) spoke about his experience. According to the latest Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors survey, which was done in September, prices have continued to fall in England and Wales, when compared with prices in the same month in 2006. Some 73 per cent. of the respondents indicated a decrease in the number of three-bedroomed or larger properties coming on to the market. The biggest decreases were in East Anglia, where there was a decrease of 87 per cent., and in the west midlands, where there was a decrease of 82 per cent. I am sorry to tell the Government that claiming that this scheme has not affected the market is fundamentally flawed, and they cannot have it both ways. They were warned by the Oxford Economics forecast in 2006 that this situation would occur and, to put it crudely, the chickens have come home to roost. It is fundamentally wrong for Labour Members to say that that is not the case.
	The history of the scheme has been a catalogue of disasters because nobody on the Government Front Bench could agree what should be in the packs in the first place. I am not fundamentally against having some form of energy test on my house, and I am perturbed that my hon. Friend the Member for Cotswold said that he did not think it was right. My property is double-glazed throughout. It has solar panels and water butts to collect rainwater. I happen to believe in such a test, but how do I get somebody to be responsible for the report? As things stand, if one sues a HIP provider, one has no recourse.
	It has been rightly pointed out that it is up to the buyer to make up their mind and not for the seller to tell them what the case is, because there is no recourse against the seller. If they leave the country, divorce, split up with someone or go on to benefits, how would the buyer get any money back? They would not be able to do so. We should examine how to provide a report on energy efficiency, but we should not do it in a way that costs more and more money.
	The other thing that I find iniquitous is the fact that this scheme started in August, with no recourse to Government or Parliament. The Opposition have been forced to demand this debate to bring it to the Government's attention. They have sneaked it out when we were all on holiday—the rugby had not even started then—and that is fundamentally wrong. They cannot sneak out a flawed system pretending that it will work when everything says that it will not.
	The hon. Member for Sheffield, Attercliffe (Mr. Betts) made a valid point that the housing market is not perfect. I know that because I used to build houses, but I do not believe that the right approach is to make the system more complicated. I fundamentally disagree with him, because his method would make it far more complicated.
	One of the things that I have always admired is the Scottish system of missives. When buying a house one goes to one's advocate and signs an undertaking. One is not allowed to gazump or break that, because if one does, one loses 10 per cent. of the contract value, whatever that may be. That is a sensible approach—I have bought and sold houses in Scotland for various family reasons and have found that it works well. There is no leeway in that market. Why can we not explore that approach? Instead of imposing more conditions on people, we could use an existing system. I believe, although I may be wrong about this, that the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Paul Holmes) said that the system in Germany works well. Let us explore what we can do, without trying to reinvent the wheel.

Douglas Carswell: The evidence is so overwhelming that I shall be brief. Home information packs are a monument to incompetent government. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, the National Association of Estate Agents, the Council of Mortgage Lenders, and even the Government's own Better Regulation Commission have been critical of HIPs. Even the Consumers Association, which was originally a supporter of the packs, said that
	"the new 'half-HIP'"—
	which lacks a home condition report—
	"will be a useless but a very expensive waste of time".
	In evidence to the House of Lords, the National Association of Estate Agents stated:
	"There are many other ways of improving the home buying process but HIPs will not achieve this. . . HIPs will actually have an adverse effect on the market. Our independent research indicates that a significant number of potential sellers will think twice before marketing their property if they have to consider paying for a HIP . . . The net result would be a reduction in supply".
	The big problem in housing is constraints on supply. Anything that further constrains supply will only exacerbate the problems that we have with housing.
	Recent research carried out by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors draws a direct link between the introduction of HIPs and the decline in instructions. Respondents to the RICS survey recorded an average fall in new instructions of 37 per cent.
	The Government have done more than anyone to build roadblocks to home ownership. They have restricted the right to buy. They have driven up council tax by turning it into a stealth tax. Now they have introduced HIPs—a further constraint on supply. How can Ministers claim that HIPs will improve home buying or home selling, when it will do nothing to address issues such as gazumping? If the Government wish to be creative about solving the problems, they should look, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater (Mr. Liddell-Grainger) suggested, at some of the ideas north of the border. HIPs are not the answer to the problem.
	The HIPs debacle, which is still unfolding, has been a test case of how not to legislate. It has been a brilliant illustration of how not to improve home buying and home selling. Home information packs represent yet another Government initiative desperately searching for a rationale. Like that other huge, monstrous Government extravagance, ID cards, HIPs are a solution looking for a problem. It is right and proper that the Conservatives are committing to the abolition of HIPs.

James Duddridge: It is always a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich (Mr. Carswell), who made an excellent speech. It is also always a pleasure to follow an Essex MP.
	The motion refers to both stamp duty and HIPs. Government Members may be interested to know that following the Conservative party's announcement on stamp duty, I have not received a single letter supporting the Conservative party's position. That is, of course, due to the Government's mishandling of the postal strike, so I have only received e-mails of support. One young couple stopped me on Sunday morning—I am sure that hon. Members will sympathise with this—when I was out and about trying to do my business with a young child in tow. One of them said, "You don't mind if I have a word." I hesitated before saying, "Of course, carry on." They explained how they had been Labour supporters but not Labour voters—they had not bothered to vote—and how, because of the stamp duty change, they had decided to vote for the first time. I am looking forward to receiving my mailbag from the Royal Mail in Southend, once the situation returns to normal.
	I have received a lot of correspondence about HIPs. I shall begin by returning to my intervention on the Minister for Housing during her opening remarks. She wrote to me on 26 June 2007 following some correspondence from my constituent, Anthony Bennett of Southend, about energy performance certificates:
	"When a property is first placed on the market, the EPC contained in the HIP cannot be more than 12 months old. This is a transitional measure, pending the result of the consultation on the allowed age of an EPC, which will be conducted over the summer."
	In replying to my intervention, the Minister seemed to indicate that that consultation had not even happened. Will the Under-Secretary confirm whether the letter of 27 June was inaccurate or whether the Minister's comment was not a fair reflection of what happened? Was the consultation over the summer abandoned and kicked into the long grass because of other problems with HIPs, or did it take place and reveal something that the Department needs to spend more time working on?
	I have also received a number of letters from people who are training to become HIPs inspectors. I have not got this constituent's authorisation to mention their name, but they stated:
	"I'm just a bit of political roadkill that no one gives a damn about."
	Some of the anger related to all politicians, but the Government introduced the initiative. There were certain EU directives around the EPC that were absolutely essential, but the Government added to the problem. The situation is an unnecessary disaster of the Government's creation. One of my constituents spent more than £10,000 training as a home inspector, which is significantly more than the sums mentioned earlier.
	I have also received correspondence from local solicitors. Charles Latham is a partner in Tolhurst Fisher. He is a respected gentleman who has served as mayor of Southend, although he is no longer directly involved in local political life. He wrote to me and stated:
	"I do seriously believe that the introduction of the packs will have a serious effect on the housing market which in turn is bound to have an effect on the overall economy of the country."
	He has 25 years' experience of conveyancing, and he has experience as an estate agent. He continued:
	"the Government has watered down the contents of the pack to make it, frankly, of little use to any interested purchaser."
	The Government have done neither one thing nor the other, and we have the worst-case scenario—a fudge between the two, which will not work. The energy report could have been done separately, which would have been simpler than gold-plating EU directives and adding to regulation. Both Government and Opposition Members care passionately about the environment, but there are different elements to it. For example, the environmental impact of flooding is especially important in Southend. Even if we were to introduce a home information pack, different people want different things in it. In Southend, environmental protection is, perhaps, more important than energy efficiency.
	The right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr. Raynsford) clearly has a vested interest in the subject both through his entry in the Register of Members' Interests and, more importantly, through his experience as a Minister. He pointed out that the housing market system has grown organically over a period of time, which is how any changes should have been introduced. If there is a market value to energy certificates, and if there is a market value for the buyer in providing a home condition report, why were people not buying such things to start with? It would be much better for the market to lead the change than for the Government to do so.
	The hon. Member for Sheffield, Attercliffe (Mr. Betts) said that the survey done by the seller could be used by the buyer. I have experience as a retail banker in the UK—admittedly four or five years ago; legislation might have changed—and the hon. Gentleman's recollection of advice given to the Select Committee is certainly not my recollection of the legal position in the United Kingdom. For there to be legal recourse to the survey, it would be important not only for the buyer to have paid for it, but for it to be addressed also to the mortgage provider, if it were to have any validity. Of course, the home condition report refers only to a particular type of survey; many people will want to do a much wider survey, so will end up having to pay double anyway. That does not make any sense whatever.
	While looking at the BBC website, I came across one provider of HIPs called HipHipHooray.com. It is poetically named, but given that HIPs have been a disaster rather than a cause for celebration, perhaps that provider should be taken to trading standards for implying that they are anything to be happy about. The HIPs process, managed by this Government, has been a complete and unmitigated disaster that will continue. There is still an awful lot of uncertainty.

Bob Neill: It is often said that if one puts any number of economists from end to end, one can get a different answer for each day of the year, and probably each hour of the day. It is certainly the case that the average first-time buyer would save something in the order of £1,700. That is real money and a real saving, and until the hon. Gentleman comes up with a real answer, there is not much point in having the argument.

Bob Neill: At the end of the day, if we assist and encourage first-time buyers, of course that will be beneficial to them. It is a bit rich for Labour Members to talk about independent evidence when, as I pointed out, they are the ones withholding independent evidence on this issue.

James Duddridge: Is my hon. Friend as worried as me that some elderly people in large houses, who would otherwise consider downsizing, thus putting more accommodation on the market for hard-working families, will not do that because of the complexity of the proposed legislation, which will do the opposite of what the Government suggest?

Bob Neill: My hon. Friend makes a valuable point. It is all very well for Government Members to laugh—perhaps they should go and speak to some elderly householders. I know that my hon. Friend does in his constituency, as I have in mine, where we have exactly the same situation. The scheme is a potential block on mobility. It is in the interests of the efficient use of the housing stock to remove barriers to mobility rather than imposing extra costs.
	The debate comes back to that air of unreality, which suggests that somehow there is a free lunch and no cost to the scheme. Ultimately, the cost of the HIPs is going to be passed on. Never mind where it falls legally, at the end of the day it will be passed on in the transaction costs one way or another. At the end of the day, HIPs are another barrier to home ownership. We shall sweep that barrier away and, with our stamp duty proposals, remove a separate significant barrier.

Bob Neill: The sadness is that the right hon. Gentleman forgets that the scheme that he was so fond of does nothing about gazumping or those vendors who do not have the wherewithal. Those costs are an element of the flaws in the current scheme.
	At the end of the day, the Government's defence is about as credible as when the late George Davis stood up and told the Old Bailey that he happened to be minding his own business walking past the Bank of Cyprus one day, when a chap he had not seen for five years ran past and stuck a sawn-off shotgun in his hand. That defence did not have any credibility as I recall, and neither does the Government's, which is shot through with holes.

Charles Walker: Government Members may think that £400 is not a lot of money, but my constituents think that it is a great deal of money. Is it not the case that HIPs are just another Labour tax on hard-working men, women and families? That is the case, so is it not about time that the Government admitted it?

Bob Neill: The point is exceedingly well made. Mobility is a key issue, as we have already discussed.
	I want to give the Minister time to reply. At the end of the day, we are in this situation: the Government have stuck to the policy, despite all the contrary evidence, with a degree of rigidity and dogmatism that would have done the Bourbons of 19th century-France proud, and we all know what happened to them. The way the Government refuse to accept reality is like a cross between Pius IX and Chairman Mao's red guards. The tragedy is that the people in this country who find hurdles set in the way of home ownership will have to wait longer than we would wish them to before a Conservative Government can get rid of this impediment to home ownership.

Question accordingly negatived.
	  Question, That the proposed words be there added,  put forthwith, pursuant to
	 Standing Order No. 31 (Questions on amendments):—
	 The House divided: Ayes 347, Noes 169.

Keith Vaz: I am most grateful to you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for allowing me the opportunity to raise the Government's proposals on a written constitution in this Adjournment debate. This debate follows on from the debate on 22 May initiated by my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen) in the light of the then Chancellor of the Exchequer's commitment to bring forward a constitutional reform Bill.
	I am delighted to see the Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon (Mr. Wills), on the Front Bench. His willingness to consult as widely as possible with the public and key groups on the issues of British identity and constitutional reform is well known, and I am pleased that he has been given responsibility for this very important matter. I hope that my hon. Friend will be able to provide the House with greater detail since the Prime Minister's statement on constitutional reform on 3 July. I know that the House is keen to know how we can progress towards a British Bill of Rights and Responsibilities and possibly a written constitution. Some consider matters of constitutional reform dry subjects for academic lawyers. I disagree. I believe that this is one of the most exciting areas of Government policy and I am sure that the Minister agrees.
	This issue is of course part of a historic process of constitutional reform that began on this island almost 800 years ago with the Greater Charter of Freedoms—the Magna Carta—codifying the rights of the individual against the power of the state. Even today, the Magna Carta informs current key political debates, and I am sure that the Minister has a copy of it with him for this debate.
	The Charter speaks to us through centuries of history. Its 29th clause states:
	"No Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned...or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed...We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the Land."
	I apologise for the lack of political correctness, but it is a direct quotation from the Magna Carta.
	That principle, which this country has defended against internal and external threats for centuries, is still a matter for profound political debate. Only yesterday, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, appeared before the Home Affairs Committee, which I have the privilege of chairing, to make the case for powers to detain people before charge for more than 28 days. That is one of the many issues that, as I will outline, lead me to be a strong supporter of a single Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. How do we ensure that this issue is discussed not only by the elite, but by representatives of groups from all over the country?
	Constitutional reform has been one of the major achievements of the Government since 1997—devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, a Mayor and Assembly for London, the process of removing hereditary peers from the House of Lords, the creation of a Ministry of Justice, the creation of a Supreme Court, the creation of a body to appoint judges independently, and the incorporation of the European convention on human rights via the Human Rights Act 1998. This has been the collective work of the Government. However, I should like to recognise in particular two Ministers who have been at the forefront of the process—Lord Irvine of Lairg and Lord Falcolner of Thoroton, who were both distinguished Lord Chancellors.
	All these reforms have been substantive changes to our unwritten and ancient constitutional tapestry, and have been remarkably successful. Even more remarkable is the lack of attention that these reforms attracted. That is, perhaps, a measure of their success. It is difficult to imagine rolling back devolution or re-installing the hereditary peers, although I understand that the Conservative party is committed to scrapping the Human Rights Act, despite presumably remaining part of the European convention on human rights.
	The convention is one of the greatest accomplishments of the finest British legal minds. While some look back to regressing into a constitutional settlement that never was, the Government and the Prime Minister are right to look forward to continuing the path towards constitutional modernisation. In his first major statement to the House, the Prime Minister proposed a number of constitutional changes to improve our democracy and governance. These reforms include the removal of the royal prerogative in 12 areas, including the power to declare war, appoint judges and even choose bishops. Parliament should warmly welcome its empowerment on these and other key issues.
	However, my focus in this debate will be the suggestion by the Prime Minister that we move away from our largely unwritten constitution and towards a single document that codifies the rights and responsibilities of those living in Britain. With reference to other countries with unwritten constitutions, I understand that only New Zealand, Canada and Israel share the United Kingdom's status.
	I am a strong supporter of such a document. Britain's last Bill of Rights was forged in 1689. For the 17th century, it was a remarkable text limiting the powers of the monarch and setting out the great freedoms that we as citizens still enjoy today, such as the freedom from cruel and unusual punishments, the freedom of speech in Parliament, the freedom from taxation by royal prerogative, and the freedom to elect Members of Parliament without interference from the sovereign. These were great and fundamental freedoms, of special importance to the development of the House, but more than 300 years have passed and it is time for a new Bill of Rights, such as a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, and for us to take the steps towards a full written constitution.
	The people of Britain hold a great sense of civic purpose, but it is not clear enough to the individual where his or her rights and duties lie, and where the Government's begin. In an age of concern about antisocial behaviour and crime, we need a document embodying the guiding values that we share as a nation. Above all, a constitution would clarify not only the collective power of the Government, but the powers of a neighbourhood, community group or family to correct antisocial behaviour. We are all stakeholders in civic society on a national, regional, local and street level. A fear is expressed in the tabloid media that the European convention on human rights is an alien document and a danger to our country. It is time to incorporate the European convention on human rights into a British written constitution, in effect bringing the convention back home.
	A constitution would allow British citizens to point to a single document containing the values, principles, rights and responsibilities that all in Britain must follow. It could be used to provide new British citizens from other countries with a sense of British identity and an understanding of British values, which is close to the heart of the Minister who has campaigned on the issues of identity and Britishness for many years.
	A constitution would state the responsibilities that go alongside those rights. To take the classic example, it would make it clear that the right to free speech goes alongside the responsibility not to incite racial hatred between groups. Beyond that, a single document could encompass the reforms, which have occurred and which will continue to occur, to our constitution. We have been fortunate that in recent memory our parliamentary process has not had to face strains and extremism that other countries have experienced to their detriment.
	My right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw), who is the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, has announced the consultation with the British public, and he has said it will begin in the autumn as requested by the Prime Minister. I am sure that his consideration of the great range of opinion will be examined carefully and thoroughly. In a recent  New Statesman interview, however, he ruled out an actual written constitution in the short term:
	"I'm not against a written constitution, but I think you've got to get the building blocks in place before you get there."
	The Minister has been entrusted—in my view rightly—with the onerous responsibility of putting those important building blocks in place. Although I am keen to ensure that there is no unnecessary foot-dragging in planning the way forward on such a radical innovation for the United Kingdom, I agree with the principle that the process should not be rushed before the public, the political establishment and, above all, the machinery of government are ready for such a change. It is vital that we take the British people with us.
	The consultation process is not the most important issue. I have just spoken to my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, North, who told me that people should e-mail the Minister. Millions of people could e-mail the Minister about what the new constitution should look like, but at the end of the day somebody must edit those suggestions. I hope that the Minister will clarify the key question of who will sit down and edit this great constitutional project. I believe that history proves that a national constitution works most effectively when the ultimate drafters—the wise men and women—hold legitimacy in the eyes of the country. The American constitution, for example, which was forged by the energies of the war of independence, was drafted by high-profile figures of many different political orientations and ambitions, and none, who moved towards a consensus. Even that great constitution was not perfect for a number of reasons—slavery remained—but it endowed legitimacy on a nation that developed a great civil society. That legitimacy is needed today and for future generations. I would be grateful if the Minister were to state who will be involved in the early stages, who will be involved in the later stages and what Parliament's role will be.
	In 100 years' time, when many of today's policy debates and manifesto commitments—even talk of a general election on 1 November—are long forgotten, I know that this Government's constitutional reform programme will be long remembered. I believe that that will be the key thing that people remember about these years. Is the Minister ready to be remembered as the Benjamin Franklin of a future British constitution?
	The Government have achieved much—with not enough recognition—in bringing Britain's constitution into the 21st century, so I look forward to hearing from the Minister how the Government plan to secure the historic achievement of a written constitution. "We, the people of the United Kingdom, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice and human rights, ensure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, and promote the general welfare of the British people": those few words are my version of how we should start the constitution. I look forward to hearing what the Minister's version will be.

Michael Wills: I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz) on securing this debate on a very important subject for this House and for the people of this country. He will not be surprised to hear that I share his view on the importance of these issues. He has brought to the debate a wealth of experience and distinguished service to this House and to this Government. I am grateful for the way in which he set out the arguments, because he covered most of the issues that we will have to confront and deal with as we embark on the programme that the Prime Minister set out to the House on 3 June this year.
	This is part of a process. Since 1997, the Government have been embarked on a radical programme of constitutional renewal. The next stage, which is set out in the Green Paper, "The Governance of Britain", seeks to forge a new relationship between Government and the citizen and to continue the journey towards a new constitutional settlement that entrusts Parliament and the people with more power. It is important to note that the Green Paper is not a blueprint but a route map that we will navigate in conversation with the British people. We are planning a far-ranging programme of consultation involving a whole range of mechanisms that we hope will produce a settlement which, as my right hon. Friend suggested, will be owned by the British people themselves; it will not be sustainable unless we do so.
	My right hon. Friend spent a large part of his speech talking about a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. The Government remain fully committed to the universal declaration of human rights made by the United Nations on behalf of the free world at the conclusion of the second world war. Those rights are also reflected in the European convention on human rights and in the Human Rights Act 1998, which brought them back to this country and made them justiciable here. However, times change, and legal norms must be continuously reassessed against changing circumstances. The Government have always said that the 1998 Act was a first step on the journey towards a full articulation of fundamental rights and responsibilities for people in the United Kingdom.
	We are now about to launch a debate about how to go forward, focusing on the way in which our commitment to these fundamental rights and responsibilities can help to bind us together and how we can make their application more transparent and accessible to the public. In particular, we wish to explore how we can make more explicit the way that these rights are mirrored by the duties that citizens owe to the state and to society and the underpinning concepts of proportionality, legitimacy and necessity in the way that the Act is implemented. In considering how that might be done, we believe that one possibility would be the passing of a new Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. We will listen very carefully to what people say to us as we embark on the consultation process throughout the country, and we will use the information that we derive from that process to work out an appropriate way of achieving those goals.
	Of course, some, like my right hon. Friend, want to go further than that and to ensure that our constitution is fully codified. The campaign for such a written constitution has a long and distinguished history in this country, with many supporters on both sides of the House. Most countries have codified written and embedded constitutions; the United Kingdom does not, for all sorts of historical reasons. Instead, our constitution has four principal sources: statute law, common law, conventions and works of authority. Unlike other countries, since the end of the 17th century there has been no key event, war or revolution that has led to the need for one document setting out the rules that govern the political system and the rights of citizens and Government.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. Could I just say to the Minister that it is helpful if he speaks towards the microphone? Otherwise, those reporting our affairs have some difficulty.